Overview: Online Community Management

In our new office space, we’ve created the Register Citizen Newsroom Cafe, open six days a week to bloggers, students and senior citizens as well as public and elected officials. Ordinary citizens stop by our offices nearly every day and share their news with us, sometimes over a cup of coffee in the cafe... Here we have a gallery, a cafe with cof…

imagine instead if news were a service whose aim is to help people improve their lives and communities by connecting them not only to information, but also to each other, with a commercial model built on value over volume... select communities that identify themselves as communities (that is: not fake, demographic labels like “millennials”) and th…

journalists can engage their audiences as contributors, advisors, advocates, collaborators and partners. This study describes in detail how newsrooms and independent journalists can grow their readership, boost their relevance and find new sources of revenue by listening to and learning from their audiences.... This is about how journalists can ge…

As we learn about the ways people use the news, what features might invite their trust and loyalty?... 32 senior strategists, designers, and developers... created prototype tools to surface the Trust Project indicators of quality, a set of fundamental journalistic principles that align with today’s news users wants and needs.

EurActiv.com is opening one of its media innovations to other media interested in increasing competitiveness through translated syndication. (Update, 31/3/16: this project was covered, among many other things, in an interview with professional EU interpreter Alexander Drechsel in his podcast Demos ex machina? Multilingual communication with Mathew…

Comments on our own content create real community and offer vital feedback to content creators and consumers both. And thus, we should fight for them to be better. Comments are not just a nice-to-have but a core part of a media site’s mission... Lots of broken comment systems are designed for a platonic ideal of how people ought to behave.... Can …

A short post on the financial costs of not having a European Public Sphere.

My sadly underwhelmed response to @sidewireinc’s gr8 “Today’s Internet is Optimized for Noise”

Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services... social engagement could solve the conversion challenge ... users enjoy free content that the website provides but are unwilling to contribute to the site monetarily. The bad news is that it’s not enough to just add participatory optio…

The afternoon session at Future Media Lab 2016 showed that while European media are warming to the idea of using advanced language technologies to share content across borders, their audiences are already well ahead of them.

Betts ... became the first data head to join the publisher’s board, recognizing data’s importance in growing its subscriptions and audience. Today, he heads up a 30-person team focused on customer analytics and research. Here are lessons from Betts on data maturity and driving audience engagement... While subscriptions are critical ... it’s not t…

With independent journalism increasingly looking like an endangered species, a EU communication strategy that helped European media build the European Public Sphere would be a smarter longterm move than propaganda and brochureware

a closer look at what types of comment sections news organizations ... value they are adding to news organizations’ overarching strategies...a list of questions to ask and best practices for news organizations seeking return on investment...key questions, considerations and links to further reading for evaluating what commenting strategy works bes…

the Internet now seems to be on constant boil... extremists of all stripes are ascendant, and just about everywhere you look, much of the Internet is terrible...social networks seem to be feeding a cycle of action and reaction. In just about every news event, the Internet’s reaction to the situation becomes a follow-on part of the story, so that …

We are creating open-source tools and resources for publishers of all sizes to build better communities around their journalism. We also collect, support, and share practices, tools, and studies to improve communities on the web. All of our tools are open source and free... small, flexible tools that plug into each other and also work with exist…

On Thursday night, as part of its ongoing coverage of the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., The New York Times highlighted reader comments in one of its most prominent digital spaces: The top of its homepage... While Times journalists interact with readers on social platforms, the paper also makes an effort to bring the conversation back to …

NYTimes' “verified commenters.”... few hundred people whose comments are posted without moderation can end up dominating the reader commenting system... causes quite understandable resentment among thousands of others...Because they go up first, their comments are almost guaranteed to get the most exposure, “and hence rise to the top and be seen …

An array of sophisticated language technologies could help ideas flow across EU borders, link national conversations together and support the EU Online Public Sphere - the demos the EU needs. But BloggingPortal is unlikely to feature them. [update (17/5/15): I finally decided to kick Medium's tyres by reposting this there, with less history. …

If you care about EU democracy you need to care about European media, particularly as the upcoming US media invasion gets underway. They'll be pushing on an open door when they get to Brussels.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the past couple of years have seen a lot of innovation in online content strategy, coupled with growing disenchantment with "Big Internet".

One for @richardmedic ... "Smydra ... he wants to find a way to allow the public to benefit from all the knowledge of future news events locked up inside newsrooms.... He'd love your thoughts" - Can you turn future news events into structured data? » Nieman Journalism Lab

"We explain the European court of justice ruling saying that Google will have to delete some information from its index – and why it has divided opinion" Good example of explainer journalism, and of how answering the comments often looks like more work than writing the thing in the first place (if you don't believe me, scan the comments): - Expl…

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…

Original linkTonight I'll be toddling along to Grilling Kippers, a UKIP-focused anti-Eurosceptic campaign from deep within the Brussels Bubble.

Last Thursday I finally caught up with Eric Maurice of PressEurop, which recently had its plug pulled by the EC following their decision to cancel its renewal tender some weeks after publishing it.

Apparently tomorrow - apart from being Australia Day - is BloggingPortal's 3rd birthday. What does it's state tell us about the EU Online Public Space? How many more friends can I lose anyway?

A recent edition of The Infinite Monkey Cage, BBC Radio4's brilliant chat show combining science and comedy, got me thinking again about the parallels between science communications and EU communications.

At last, an opportunity to blog about gardening and EU comms in the same post.

On November 8, MEPs will discuss '10 concrete political proposals' for creating the European public sphere via digital media, developed by IHECS (Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales) and their partners via Socialeuropeanjournalism.com.

Next week will see yet another physical meeting in Brussels dedicated to exploring the European public space, an irony which appears permanently lost to the organisers of the neverending stream of conferences, seminars and workshops which can be only attended by Brussels Bubble Insiders, and have neither webstreaming nor any online community (Euro…