Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

Today, the newsletter is a petri dish, where audience-development teams tinker .... Publishers that treated email as its own animal saw benefits including massive boosts in traffic and upticks in digital subscribers... subscribers are disproportionately loyal ... an ideal group to test ideas on

Today I have just one Topic: Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. This advice, from Professor Cal Newport in the New York Times, may seem counter-intuitive. Which is exactly the point.

the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not ... Any 16-year-old with a smartphone can invent a hashtag ... The idea that if you engage in enough of this low-value activity, it will somehow add up to something of high value in your career is dubious ... snake oil and flimflam... why not also expose your…

what we were doing was akin to “curation”: picking the best gems of news and analysis, and constructing a narrative around them for time-pressed readers drowning in the information overload of the web. And we were forging a direct relationship with our readers. That led me to talk with colleagues in other media organizations... understand the tre…

disconnectionists don’t seem to have a robust political plan for addressing their concerns; it’s all about small-scale individual action. “Individuals unplugging is not actually an answer to the biggest technological problems... We must subject social media to the kind of scrutiny that has been applied to the design of gambling machines in Las Veg…

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”... if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth... when confron…

Two convergent trends are making populism a potent negative force. First, democracies have morphed into unrepresentative plutocracies that lead growing numbers of people to feel shut out and voiceless... Media ... business model is now based on social media and clicks, not facts. Clicks depend on theatrical performance, stunts, celebrity, ent…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…

This principle of science writing... teaches the writer to lead the reader, step by step, from knowing nothing about a subject to understanding enough to grow enchanted with its broader significance.... Imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more. The sec…

I finally vlogged my first event. Some first impressions.

One of the vlogs I did at the EU Week of Regions & Cities with the winners of the #EUinmyRegion blogging competition I ran for the EC. All vlogs can be found in this Moment.

This updates both my earlier Taming the Firehose and Where is social media taking you in 2016? posts, and better aligns my productivity process with my personal content strategy.

A content marketing framework... allows you to develop a process that can be duplicated... repeatable framework for any type of content to be better utilized... incorporate goal setting at the beginning... an understanding from goal setting to how you’re going to put that into a strategy ... Once you publish ... get feedback and optimize the conte…

two products, Springboard and Time Inc. Connect to help editors source content from contributors, some for traditional editorial content and some for native or branded content... a way for editors to create more content around specific topics or events rather than just getting content on the cheap... gathering ... people with some degree of social…

over 30 news organizations ... and tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to share best practices on how to verify true news stories and stop the spread of fake ones.

“a monopoly of content distribution that will be mainly driven by user-generated content, and by professional content by commercially interested players.... pretty traumatic scenario of information or propaganda. It will be very painful for democracies.”

with newsrooms reeling... a weakening of the stable platforms threatens to cause general informational impoverishment, a degradation of the entire information ecosystem. Adding to the worry, people today are exposed to news ... through a single platform—mainly social networks, which tend toward a clustering of like-minded individuals. Together,…

I’m not saying that these are the only principles that work on Twitter. But I think they’ve worked for me, and for my purposes.

Had a great time setting up and running a blogging competition for the EU Commission’s Regional Policy department. It’s not over yet, though: the three winners announced today are coming to Brussels this October as fully accredited journalists to European Week of Regions and Cities. 

This new tool shows users what Facebook determines are their interests... has provided a glance into the deep flaws of Facebook’s interest targeting. Advertisers should be concerned about where their dollars are going... Here are the main flaws I came across:... I would just recommend approaching targeting differently:

as news outlets tailor their content to addictive platforms to pump up traffic, the distinction between consuming journalism and being wedded to “emails, constant notifications, and social media” is increasingly meaningless... if we are what and how we read, then our thinking will mirror the scattered and shallow tendencies of Web browsing.... …

a research paper ... found depressing proof that the web is fuelling segregation.... matched the attitudes of those who did and did not have broadband with data on partisan hostility... Greater use of the web ensured that an admirer of Jon Stewart would think that conservatives were not just mistaken but stupid, or a viewer of Fox News would wor…

Content creators everywhere ... are all suffering from the results of peak content... the information age is arriving at its natural conclusion and we’re all drowning in it... most content under-performing, it’s also getting harder for people who produce really good content to get attention. Engagement... is steadily dropping ... what happens to e…

image... apparently shows the spread of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident... being shared widely ... despite the fact that it... shows the wave height of the tsunami... you might want to doublecheck before hitting Share... here’s how

So for the sake of simplicity we can break up content marketing into 3 types.A: Traffic Generation Content — Tempt people to click through to your website, blog or landing page and share.B: Engagement Content- The strategic use of educational, informative, entertaining and inspiring content that builds credibility, trust and linkingC: Conversion C…

For the purposes of this post, let’s narrow landing pages down to those connected to content marketing or email marketing campaigns, and meant to generate conversions, bearing in mind those conversions may not necessarily be revenue-generating sales.

You may not care about social media now, but if you read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV, then it’s shaping your world already... The real game is hardening your own support in ways dramatic enough to be picked up by the mass media ... the easiest way of doing that is to pick a rollicking fight... Lacking an established political mac…

some advice on how to best approach analytics in the newsroom, helping journalists improve the quality of their content, and a build larger, more engaged readership. Here are five key takeaways