TL;DR issue 1

What is TL;DR? It stands for “too long; didn’t read”, and is ancient internet slang. But it also acknowledges that journalists and other publishing types are busy people who don’t have time for reading a lot of extraneous material.

I’ve experimented with a variety of aggregation formats here over the past couple of years, and the ones that get the most traction tend to be the short, snappy ones. Journalists do not want epic newsletters (even if they tend to write them). They're just too damn busy to read them.

Deadlines: spoiling everyone's fun. 😇

This first few TL;DRs will be open to everyone. For the rest of the year, it will be for subscribers only. From January, it will be for paid subscribers only. (All assuming that the format works and that people like it…)

I hope you enjoy it — and find it of value.

Creator Economy

• 🤑 The creator economy is only making a handful of people rich — early days yet, but indications are that this could be another situation where only a handful of the biggest names make a living from this, and they make an exceptional living at that. And the rest of us scrabble around after the table scraps…
• 👷So maybe it needs a middle class.
• 👾 Interview with a Twitch streamer earning seven figures… I think she counts as one of the rich handful.

Newsletters

• 🤥 Ozy Media was using some dubious techniques to goose its subscriber numbers… The worst is adding people back to lists after they unsubscribe.
• 📧 Quartz goes back to its roots — betting on newsletters for revenue

Reporting

• 🤔 A weird social media rebuttal technique from the UK government…
• 🤦‍♂️ An American politician wants to prosecute a journalist for viewing the source of a webpage. Really, these people are regulating tech, which they clearly don’t understand.
• 🛡Online self-protection advice for journalists. It’s becoming clear that this needs to be part of all journalists’ training.
• 👻 What to do if an editor ghosts you. I hope I never behaved this way, back when I was a features editor.

Audience Engagement

• 👨‍💻The Community Engagement Ecosystem — this is a useful guide from the ever-reliable FeverBee.

TikTok

• ☢️ TikTok's algorithm leads users from transphobic videos to far-right rabbit holes
• ☣️ Revealed: anti-vaccine TikTok videos being viewed by children as young as nine. We’re going to end up seeing the Facebook propaganda problem as “the good old days”, aren’t we?

Platforms

• 🎧 Facebook adds an audio hub. It’s coming for podcasting…
• ✋ Twitter lets you stop people following you without blocking them. Finally.
• 👂 It’s also rolling out a tab for its Spaces Clubhouse cl… uh… audio room feature
• 💥 The ‘gram will let you know when it’s down. A way of reducing pressure on the servers during outages?
• 👯‍♀️ It’s also adding collaboration features for Reels.
• 📲 Using the Stories format in journalism.
• 😂 Donald Trump’s new social media platform is going well. Not.
• 😳 And a museum has opened an OnlyFans account. They’ll be posting nudes, obviously.

Podcasts

• 🎧 Which countries have the most podcast listeners — and why?

SEO

• 📰 Google wants to own more breaking news traffic
• 👨‍💻 Updated guidance on page titles — SEO headlines, by any other name.
• 📱 Google starting to roll out endless scrolling for mobile search results.
• 😬 And search rankings seem to be shifting around a lot this year.

CMSes

• 📽 WordPress adds paid video hosting
• 💌 Ghost adds member filtering and the ability to send emails without publishing posts

Newsroom Management

• 🕵🏻‍♀️ Getting agile to test theories in the newsroom.
• 🎤 Managing change — and automating audio versions of articles.
• 🧑🏻‍🔬 The limits of A/B testing.

WTF…

• …is going on with Facebook’s PR guy?

There you go. I hope you found that useful — feedback gratefully received.