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

Or, at least, some newsrooms don't. Perhaps they don't want to hear what readers have to say…

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth

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

x

Business

Facebook

Instagram

Newsletters

Podcasts

Social Media

Twitter

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.

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?

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…

🤔 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.

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Adam Tinworth Twitter

Adam is a lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, and a journalist for more than 30. He lectures on audience strategy and engagement at City, University of London.

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