tl;dr #5: the catch-up edition

Apologies for missing last week. A crunch point in my working life left me little time to do anything but prepare for, deliver and follow-up courses and lectures.

Things are just starting to ease off, so, without further self-flagellation, let's get on with the latest catch-up reading.

(I still have many, many browser tabs open awaiting my attention, so next week is likely to be a bumper edition, too.)

Facebook

• 🤬A compromise led to people encountering more racist abuse
• 🇦🇪 Think Facebook has moderation problems in English? You ain’t seen nothing yet…

SEO

• 🏡 Google News adding more features for local news.
• 🔎 Here’s Google’s own announcement.
• 🧑🏼‍💻 Author profile pages could be a significant factor in what you rank for in Google News.
• 🤥 Did you miss my piece on AMP? Shame on you!

Social Networks

• 😵 Once active Clubhouse communities are shadows of their pandemic selves.
• 💼 How Harvard Business Review used LinkedIn as an Audience Engagement tool.
• 🤩 The most-followed accounts on social platforms. The key take-away here is that the secret to success starts with “be famous already”…

Twitter

• 🗣The top 25% of Twitter users produce 97% of all tweets.
• 🙈 But journalists are pulling away from it — or wish they could. Interestingly, enthusiasm for the platform among the journalism students I teach declines year after year.
• 😜 Poor timing — the platform is finally getting interesting again.

Community Management

• 🔨 How to build great communities — it’s all in the admins and mods

Misinformation

• 👩🏼‍🔬 Confronting misinformation head on works — if you are a trusted source
• 🦠 Social media creating a “virus of lies”. Hard to argue with this. Her point about it creating alternative realities makes me wonder if we’re already living in a misinformation metaverse…
• 👺 Scammers posing as guest editors to publish fake academic papers.
• 💸 How Google and Facebook are funding misinformation. No — it’s not intentional, but they’re creating the landscape that makes it pay.

Podcasts

• 🎙How podcasting works — and why we should value its open nature.
• 🙄 Medium buys an audio company. It should just rename itself “infinite pivot” immediately.
• 🎧 Make podcasts very short or very long. This is just the “audience attention state” idea, first expressed as the Quartz curve: people like short, snappy, efficient information exchange, or in-depth, lean-back experiences.

Research tips

• 👩🏽‍💻 How to manipulate URLs to find more information
• 📅 How to find the creation date of Facebook accounts

Journalism practice

• ✈️ How a Brighton local journalist’s story ended up on the nationals’ front pages
• 💬 Is there a structural problem with how we report politics?
• 🖱 There might not be a clear model of which headlines will work and which won’t…
• ✍🏽 Some ways to avoid waster words in your stories.

Business Models

• 🧾 Let’s be clearer about who is actually a subscriber.
• 🙏🏻 30 Ukrainian journalists whose title closed are launching their own site and funding it via Patreon.
• 🇦🇺 In Australia, a tycoon is helping small publishers get deals from Google like the big publishers have. Such a flawed system.
• ☎️ In the US, pressure is growing on publishers to make it as easy to unsubscribe as it is to subscribe… (Looking at The Times in the UK, among others, who force you to call up to cancel your subscription.)

Consequences

• 🧑🏻‍🚒 When the social firehose gets pointed at you? Or… if it gets turned off.
• 👩🏻‍⚖️ Is there no escape from bad deeds in the past — even if committed in the midst of a mental health crisis?
• 🎻 Alex Jones loses by default in remaining Sandy Hook defamation suits. No violin small enough for the Infowars guy.

etc

• 📔Do magazine covers still matter in the digital age? Doesn’t really nail the key point, which is that they can do, if they have the potential to go viral on social as essentially a form of meme image. That’s what I’d be doing with cover commissions in the third decade of the 21st century. (But it has been nearly two decades since I commissioned a cover, so…)
• 👨🏼‍🔧 Why publishers should start experimenting with blockchain. (I’d wait — this is in danger of becoming a distraction while people figure out the use case for the tech. Unless you have cash to burn, in which case, go for it. And hire me to consult on it. 🤓)

The thought-provoking read

The problem with the “creator economy”

Nadia Eghbal:

When I imagine a cultural renaissance that inspires me, I think about working together to address unsolved questions, tugging on threads in conversations that need unraveling, creating enduring artifacts for generations to pore over and iterate upon. The “publish or perish” model that nudges people to rack up more followers is not the pinnacle of creative freedom; it’s indentured spiritual servitude.

Challenging, to say the least.