TL;DR #2 — the plague house edition

I could have easily filled this issue with material about Facebook — but apart from a few brief mentions at the beginning, I’m not going to.

We know what we need to know:

1. Facebook is a bad company
2. Many of us still need it for reader acquisition, but we should be working hard to turn those relationships into direct ones, rather than mediated ones.

What more do we need to know?

Facebook

• 👨🏻‍💻 The Facebook Papers are largely from Workplace — the company’s internal version of its product. So, we’re not seeing formal internal memos. We’re seeing the company’s staff thinking aloud. I’m not sure if that makes the revelations better or worse.
• 📰 Living article listing all the Facebook Papers reporting.
• 🤴🏼 The problem at the heart of Facebook, through the eyes of someone who has interviewed him repeatedly.
• 🛠 How to fix social media. Long. Worth it.

Newsletters

• 📧 Twitter now allows you to subscribe to Revue newsletters directly from Tweets.
• 🦠 How newsletters ended up as a central source of COVID information.

Publishing strategy

• 🧓🏽 Older Brits got more digital during the pandemic. Time to revise your assumptions about the 60+ audience.
• 💸 Dynamic paywalls. Off-the-shelf software is emerging to allow publishers too use them without having to build them in-house. But should they?
• 📱 Should your title have an app? Probably not — getting people to open the damn things is hard. But there are some reasons why it might work.

Audience engagement

• 📲 Four non-Facebook strategies for attracting readers.
• 💬 I love this. Text chats with fact-checkers.

SEO

• 🚨 It's looking like Google's motivations for pushing Accelerated Mobile Pages were less than pure. This could be a big scandal — but has been buried by the Facebook news.
• 📰 Best practices for syndicated content
• 👨🏾‍🔬 Good briefing on topical (or subject domain) authority. It seems likely that topical authority is increasingly more important than overall domain authority.

Aggregators

• 🌆 Apple News gets local in three more US cities

Analytics

• 👨🏻‍🔬Reach bringing in external analytics and data expertise -– at board level.
• 📈 How to overcome your metrics anxiety…
• 🔌 Or, of course, you could always join my well-reviewed analytics course which kicks off on Tuesday…

Extremely Online

• 😠 Cancellation does work (until Substack comes calling…)

Community management

• 🎭 Twitter makes the case for online anonymity.
• ✋🏻 The design of comment sections might be excluding female voices.
• 🤬 Interesting look at the co-ordinated hate campaign on Twitter against the Duchess of Sussex.

On Background

• 🤔 Why the Metaverse is a bad idea.
• 👗 Magazines were screwing up teens’ self-image long before the ‘gram came along.

🤦‍♂️

• 💰 Publishers still experimenting with NFTs. I’m sure the tech underlying them will prove useful in persistent virtual worlds, but this still looks fad-shaped to me.

Quote of the Week

Mic Wright:

That’s the natural end point of scoop culture: Breathlessly hyping your upcoming story as if it’s a trailer for a new TV show then announcing it’s about a woman’s violent death with a series of emoji.