Engaged Reading Digest: Stories, Analytics and Podcast Communities
A bumper load of interesting reading about engaged journalism and journalism development. Enjoy!
It's been a busy few weeks, so my apologies for an absence of updates over the last couple of weeks. Expect a few catch-up posts while I catch up on my own reading.
Instagram strengthens community promotion tools
This is another clear sign that Instagram, as a product, is becoming as much about communication and community building as it is a publishing tool. Adjust your though processes accordingly.
Taylor Peterson
Podcast fans are forming their own communities
A useful reminder that any successful media form becomes a social object that people will gather around. If you, as a podcast producer, don't create a place for your community to gather, they will create their own places.
SubStack has been doing interesting work here, allowing your newsletter to become the social object a community gathers around.
Taylor Lorenz
Making your podcast stand out
I must admit, talk of "peak podcast" (or peak newsletter) annoys me. I don't recall anyone ever talking about "peak magazine"… There's plenty of ear time left out there, and people will switch for the right concept. The discussion on podcasts is turning inwards within traditional media, but there are still many lessons to be learnt from podcasts outside the journalism community.
Matt Locke
A complete(ish) guide to social media analytics
As with so many of these things, it's highly geared towards marketing types rather than journalists or publishers — but there's some useful material here. When day, when I get enough time (or subscribers here) I'll write one of these specifically for journalists and other content professionals.
Subs and Newsletters
Two posts from WAN-IFRA, whose site's HTML doesn't play nicely with Ghost's bookmark cards, hence the old-fashioned links.
- How Scandinavian publishers are wooing Gen Z — it's not just being on the platforms that the younger generation are on, it's adopting the language and visual style of them, and using that to tell stories that matter to them. Good insights here.
- The rise of newsletter startups — Newsletters are the new blogs. It's easy, and low cost to start one, and the medium of delivery solves the attention problem (as I've just illustrated if you're reading this in your in-box…). Well worth watching, and thinking how it could apply to your own work.
The Dark Spaces of Chat Apps
This is the downside of the switch to chat apps as the major focus of social media development - we can't easily see what's going on in there. And that makes them an even better vector for viral disinformation than traditional social platforms.
Sharon Moshavi
The streamer wars continue
Live streaming talent is now so valuable to the big tech companies, that they're poaching talent from each other. This is a whole media ecosystem developing, which overlaps somewhat with the traditional YouTube community, but which is clearly its own thing. Worth watching.
Two Good Reads
This is a great example of using available open source tools and mad verification skills to break a story. The next time journalist Twitter breaks into warfare over shorthand think how relevant that discussion is to this sort of journalism…
Chris Stokel-Walker
This is a sobering — but impressive — use of data journalism and multimedia storytelling to dive deep on the true cost of the Australian wildfires.
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