tl;dr: the “we don’t talk about audience” edition

My daughters first saw Encanto with the Brownies and Rainbows back in the tail end of 2021, and so this household has been not talking about Bruno (no, no, no) before it was cool.

What we do talk about is the new subscribers here, thanks to OM&HB's prominent place in journalism.co.uk's list of blogs by journalists, for journalists. Hello, welcome aboard — and please do drop me a line to introduce yourself!

For newcomers tl;dr is a weekly-ish dump of links that might be useful to people in audience engagement, engaged journalism or social media roles. It's an eclectic selection of what I think is useful — and some of the links may be weeks old. It just depends on how much time I've had to catch up on my reading.

I hope, as ever, that you find them useful…

Audience

• 👩🏻‍🔬 Some great insights from audience work done by The Atlantic.
• 😮‍💨 Avoiding community manager burnout. Useful for anyone in an audience-facing role.
• 👷🏼Here’s what it’s like as a publisher’s online safety editor. This feels like a job role more publishers should be exploring.
• 😔 Some rather depressing research into how little audience thinking has actually made its way into newsrooms.
• 👩🏻‍🔬 Maybe a data-centric approach might help?

Business

• 🤑 Brian Morrissey points out the obvious, but really well: it’s much easier to target wealthy niches than less well-off ones. (I am beginning to think that targeting folks in journalism might have been a strategic error.)
• 😹 A nice piece of satire about the clichés in use about entrepreneurial journalism.
• 👍🏻 So, it’s nice to see The Markup explicitly trying to reach out to readers outside the niche of the rich…
• 👮NewsGuard — which rates websites by trustworthiness — is profitable, it claims. I must take another look — I remember playing with it when it launched, but haven’t touched it since.

Facebook

• 🙄 Oh, look, another former Facebook exec is raising concerns about the company.
• 🤪And it appears to be becoming a wasteland of reposted trivial memes.

Instagram

• ↕️ Instagram now testing cloning TikTok’s vertical scrolling…
• 💰It’s also trialling creator subscriptions in the US.
• 👴🏼 Why BBC News is focusing on Instagram, and not TikTok.

Newsletters

• 🏦 Axios launches Pro newsletters for $599 annually. That’s entirely feasible if you’re targeting either wealthy individuals or, more likely, wealthy companies, who can absorb the cost.
• 📧 A quick guide to what Apple’s email tracking prevention has done to open rates.
• 🦠 Substack is proving a lucrative home for anti-vaxxers.
• 🤭 The above link might explain why Substack felt the need to publish this: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will make it worse.

Podcasts

• 🤫 Weird. Some of Spotify’s big name signings basically never make shows.
• 🪲 Podcasts hosted on Anchor may not play in some podcast apps.
• 🕵🏻‍♀️ More evidence that podcasts and investigative journalism go very well together — from the UK local press

Social Media

• 🎞 A handy guide to image sizes for social media from Hootsuite.
• 📌 You should be paying more attention to Pinterest. I’ve been saying this for at least five years.

Twitter

• 📼 Who can record their Spaces? Anyone can record their spaces!
• 🎙 This is how newsrooms are experimenting with them. Well, US newsrooms, at least.
• 😳 Spaces are attracting the wrong kinds of users…
• ✔️🛑 And freelance journalists have had enough of Twitter according them second class status.
• 🔍 Research into the behaviours of US adults on Twitter. Of note:

the most active 25% of U.S. adults on Twitter by tweet volume produced 97% of all tweets

Video

• ✋🏽 YouTube shuts down most of its original content efforts. Oh, I’d love to know the politics of this. Who thought this was a good idea? What did they think they could achieve that their user content couldn’t? Did someone have ambitions to turn YouTube into Netflix? There’s such a good long-form feature to be written about this.

Want more?

Five more links I published to demonstrate something to my Audience Strategy students at City.

News Review: Instacash, more cash less dash for Tortoise, and Substack gets into video

Six stories from around the web that will inform your audience strategy.

One Man & His BlogAdam Tinworth

The Big Read: The Fall of Politics For All

Perhaps it's something about the people who I choose to follow on Twitter, but I laregly missed the Politics For All phenomenon. It was a popular Twitter account that tweeted out politics stories, with a sensational first tweet, and a link to the original story in the second tweet of the short thread.

That was, most likely, to work around Twitter's new habit of down-ranking tweets with links in them, but it led to accusations that the account was basically stealing attention from the reporters who did the work in the first place.

But it was incredibly popular in the interesection of journalism and politics Twitter, in the UK in particular. And then, one day Twitter killed the account. Here's what happened:

Why Did Politics For All Get Suspended? Inside the UK News Twitter Account

Teen admins, shady ads and an origin story that begins with Alex from Glasto – how exactly did PFA get so big, only to disappear so dramatically?

Moya Lothian-McLean

Bonus link

Here's the founder of Politics For All's view on what happened:

What really happened to Politics For All | The Spectator

On 2 January I woke up late to the sound of my phone buzzing continuously and a sense that something had gone badly wrong. The first message was from a friend. ‘Having a nice holiday?’ he wrote, above a screenshot of my political Twitter account covered in block letters: ‘Suspended.’ My reaction was…

The SpectatorNick Moar

🤔 If nothing else, this suggests that you don't really need to understand how a network operates to be incredibly successful at farming attention from it.

Until I grace your inboxes again, have fun — and do send me any links you think I should include.