Overview: Content Strategy

How much more could Google News be? See "... a presentation that a German designer came up with that involved a wholesale redesign and re-thinking of what Google News is and does." Lots of good stuff here. Particularly like how 'smart personalisation' is used to help penetrate the filter bubble: "automatically suggest related stories on a news t…

Is primetime TV advertising the right way to connect citizens to the EU?

"Hughes will be establishing a health and science desk that will consist of approximately five reporters, according to an email from BuzzFeed. A science staff of that size will catapult BuzzFeed News into the top tier of science news sites by sheer size alone. It won't have the largest staff of science reporters, but it will be among the largest. …

"Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day" - The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains

what it says in the box - How to Create Amazing Infographics - Design School

"an interactive mission, with all other elements of the campaign designed to direct people to experience it.... a range of media including TV, online rich video takeovers and a 30-second You Tube trailer." That doesn't scratch the surface of what I reckon is probably the best thing I've seen online all year. A must see.

"Although Serial’s audience has broken records, it  is far from the only podcast that enjoys serious listener engagement —successful podcasts often have that ability to move audiences... “It’s on-demand, so people are actively choosing what they want to listen to, stories are delivered with a human voice and personality. The intimacy of radio i…

"Charted automatically visualizes data. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable visualization of that data... open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co... it adjusts to any screen, automatically updates itself" - Introducing Charted - Data Lab - Medium

"Readers spend a lot of time on RealClear's sites... because there's a seemingly endless amount of well-curated links to top publications writing about the big news stories of any given day... The result is a true smorgasbord of opinion, rather than a collection of links aimed at furthering a particular point of view... The expert level of curati…

Really good longread on where journalism is now, and some ideas of where it needs to go. "The public sphere is now operated by a small number of private companies, based in Silicon Valley... a defining issue not just for journalism but the whole of society... social media platforms ... have abdicated editorial responsibilities to software and al…

(FT paywall) "Serial’s success is the most visible example of a renaissance in podcasting – a format that has been around for a decade but which has received a recent surge of interest from consumers, investors and advertisers." Massively underused medium for EU comms, IMHO. - Podcasting poised to go from niche to mainstream - FT.com

" four ways to use visual content to expand your reach and improve social media results" Pretty standard stuff, but "3. Convresation starters" should be used more. - How to Use Visual Content to Improve Social Media Results

Overpriced and under-powered?

"Trove wants to get to the holy grail of content by combining the power of algorithmic filtering and the abilities of human curators. So Trove allows you to follow curators and their news-feeds, but also recommends articles and topics based on what it knows about you " - Slashdot founder Rob Malda on Trove and fixing the problem with Twitter — Te…

"So, don't worry TOO much about your editorial calendar. The key is posting consistently (which is definitely helped by actually using one). Don't be a slave to it. If you have a great idea — run with it, and worry about cleaning up your calendar later." This is common sense, of course, but something to keep in mind when working on projects, whic…

"Politico has redesigned its website for the first time in its seven year history, and The Guardian's U.S. recent refresh marks the first time it's redesigned almost entirely in public, with its readers' input. Here's a look at the thinking behind the redesigns, and what the publishers were able to pull off." - Politico, HBR, The Guardian: W…

"the point of any headline is to draw readers into a story. Rather, what makes clickbait clickbait is the letdown you feel when the story doesn’t deliver on the headline’s promise.... these cynical ploys are partly a product of an online-media business model that revolves around page-views and banner ads.... BuzzFeed and Vice are in the vanguard…

"Al Jazeera English ... has developed from a TV channel to a media organisation with a multiplatform offering ranging from written news to interactives.... the outlet uses interactives as a way to offer its audience a fuller picture.... we complement the coverage on all the other platforms and the coverage on TV... Telling stories built with peop…

"The latest trend in storytelling is not driven by super-innovative technology. It requires no expensive accessories and is accessible to all ages and backgrounds. It’s called LISTENING." Gotta love an article which starts like that! Apart from the practical guidelines promised, I liked its observation "about the temporal nature of sound - unable…

"blogging is so hyped as a panacea, you'd think that simply adding a blog to your site would also help you find the perfect spouse, cure the common cold, and even turn lead into gold. ... you should always question anything that's touted as the right answer for everyone (and everything). So should you blog?... let's look at a few examples of w…

"recent scientific work is putting a much finer point on just how stories change our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors... to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first ... develop tension during the narrative... it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it and continue mimicking t…

"By submitting your content and your keyword through nTopic we determine statistically how relevant your content is to the keyword and make recommendations on how to improve it. Getting your nTopic score is completely free, but you must upgrade to get access to keyword recommendations. "

"Search engines, especially Google, have gotten remarkably good at understanding searchers' intent—what we mean to search for, even if that's not exactly what we search for. How in the world do they do this? It's incredibly complex, but in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the basics—what we all need to know about how entities are connected i…

"Through applying semantic markup to our site, we've embedded an incredibly rich layer of meaningful data in our code.... but don't let the search engines have all the fun; we can use that data, too. By looking at the semantic markup on any given page, we can see what type of "entity" we're looking at ... and its attributes or properties. If we c…

"this is a slippery slope at best: once you have made the decision to alter the flow ... based on abstract criteria programmed into an algorithm, then at some point you are going to decide ... to hide or remove certain things ... to improve the signal-to-noise ratio ... The whole point of having a social network in the first place is that the peo…

"One of the standout features of the recent resurgence of email newsletters from news outlets has been a focus on providing an aggregated experience that encompasses what other publications produce.... the idea is to pick the best and most relevant content, whether it comes from their own stable or someone else's... by producing the highest qual…

"a lot of great content was getting lost in the shuffle, because there weren't enough discovery tools... when a user pulls up the topic picker, each choice reveals other sub-topics that might be of interest. Flipboard used to offer 30 topics, but now it offers a total of 34,000 ... it's deep topic analysis - we use it to surface what other p…

" the basic news story was invented in a different time –when story telling was limited by platform — and it has inherent limitations that you can overcome when trying to tell stories digitally." Don't just assume that what you should be doing is creating 'articles'. Some really useful tricks to free your mind when developing a content strategy h…

"Swarmize enables journalists to tell new, collaborative stories by making use of real-time data collection and visualisation" Just the tests they've already done are awesome. The code's on GitHub. Think to use in surveys, real-time social media monitoring, live blogs ... anything where real-time is useful and/or you might want a second bite at t…

"we are kicking off the relaunch of The Lede with a three-part series on content strategy... we begin with an element of content strategy that often gets overlooked … but that is crucial to understanding your audience intimately enough to influence it." Hint: it's AUDIENCE. And it's a podcast, so grab it and give it a listen tomorrow morning on y…