TL;DR Issue 4: Plagarism, Twitter goes blue, and a journalist gets punched in the face

It's a busy week, so let's stay true to the mission, cut the waffle, and get down to the links…

SEO

• 🛒 Google clearly feeling some pressure and trying to recruit small businesses to defend it…
• 👨🏼‍⚖️ Google wins a court case on privacy. The Open Rights Group is not impressed.
• 🗂 And it might end up supporting IndexNow, a system for letting search engines know that there’s something new to index, which is used by Bing and Yandex. Shades of PubSubHubub here.

Instagram

• 💻 I forgot to highlight this at the time: Instagram now allows posting from desktop. Could we have the iPad app next?
• ⌛️It’s testing an anti-doom scrolling feature.
• 🤑 Are you ready to pay your favourite Instagrammers for extra content?

Facebook

• ‼️ It’s just full of plagiarised content
• 👴🏽 And that might be contributing to its youth issue.

Twitter

• 🌐 Twitter Blue is here — if your here is the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
• 🦔 Buried within it is a reborn version of the much-missed Nuzzel.
• 🌆 It’s now showing uncropped images on the web.
• 👨🏻‍💻 And it’s building out a crypto/blockchain team.

Content Strategy

• ✍🏽 Vox is refining and refocusing its strategy. This is fascinating — it feels like a title that has, naturally, become a little wooly on its focus over time, setting some clear strategy about what’s next for it. It’s all in the execution, though…
• 🤬 The Verge has had it with tech off-the-record background briefings.
• 👺 The truth is paywalled — but the lies are so very free.
• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 MyLondon seems to be working. Why?

Audience Engagement

• 🦄 OpenWeb, a comments and community platform, hits tech unicorn status. A combination of good tech and good community management might well be the future of news-based communities.
• 🙊 The “comments good or bad” discourse is back on.
• 🤦 How NOT to do customer service via social media.

Podcasting and Audio

• 🎧 Short-form, personalised audio news still struggling. Is this a solution searching for a problem?
• 🎙Axel Springer seen the future in audio. But it’s podcasts and discovery-led.
• 🎤 Clubhouse might finally be finding its way as a community space for recording audience participation podcasts.

YouTube

• 👎🏻 YouTube is hiding dislike counts by default. Some people in social media circles are upset by this, but I think it’s the right call. They’ve been over-weaponised for political and culture war purposes. Defensive design is necessary on social platforms.

Newsletters

• 📧 We haven’t reached peak newsletter yet. (Did people ever talk about peak magazine or peak newspaper?)

Diversity and Recruitment

• 👨🏾‍🤝‍👨🏼 Interesting interview with Eleanor Mills about unbalanced news teams.
• 🧑🏻‍🔬 And the Reuters Institute have a new report out. (They sent me a preview copy — with about 15 hours until the embargo and a full day of lecturing ahead of me. Expect something tomorrow or over the weekend on it.)

Life in Journalism

• 🇵🇭 Profile of Rappler, the investigative news outlet in the Philippines, under extreme government attack.
• 😵 Meanwhile, the UK government is slowly killing FOI.
• 🔥 Poor hack punched in the face for filming an illegal fire.
• 🤗 Has closing Reach’s offices brought journalists closer to their communities?

Listen 👂🏼

Good podcast from Jacob at journalism.co.uk — I love the way he’s editing extracts from news:rewired sessions into these podcasts. This is a useful one on managing distributed teams.

Improving communication in a virtual newsroom - Newsrewired special

Working from home has left many journalists feeling burnt out, isolated, and unable to contribute to meetings on Zoom. Learn how to change online conversations so everyone feels heard and valued

Journalism.co.ukJacob Granger

Jobs

• RCNi / Nursing Standard looking for an audience engagement assistant.
• And the FT is looking for a Social Media and SEO editor in New York

&tc

• Cory Doctorow is not here for your NFT grift

And Finally…

This is an important story to me personally. The hotel that burned down was the place I was staying with my now-wife the weekend I proposed to her. But it’s also good to see organisations reflecting on coverage after the event.

DevonLive mark five years on from devastating day Exeter’s Royal Clarence hotel burned down

The memory of Exeter’s illustrious Royal Clarence and the day it burned to the ground is forever etched in the minds of the city

Behind Local News UKBehind Local News

Phew. All done. Hope your week is going well.