For once, Facebook doesn't seem to be the centre of attention, with big shifts like TikTok expanding to 10 minute videos, Twitter making more changes and some eye-opening moves from Reach dominating the news. Onwards to the links!
Audience Engagement
- 🧪 The periodic table of community management
- 😤 Metaverse community management is going wrong already.
- 📹 Using social video to boost engaged time…
- 👹 A journalist engages with a troll via email. This is absolutely NOT a scalable — or safe — approach. But it can be surprisingly effective. Twitter’s Joanna Geary did this years ago in her Birmingham Post days, and it made a difference.
Business Models
- 💸 Former client the FT hits 1 m digital subscribers, with journalism now their biggest revenue stream.
- 🔮 Three very interesting predictions for news business models from the FT.
- 👩🏽💻 Reach has a mixed bag of results, but is doing well in getting readers to register.
- 💰 Did Australia’s attempt to make Google and Facebook pay publishers work?
- 🛍 YouTube, king of monetisation, offering new ways to make money from Shorts and shopping.
- 🌋 Are we at peak subscription? (Probably not — but people will keep asking this question.
- 👂🏼What podcasting’s best listeners think of ads.
- 👥 New tools for managing groups. QR codes could work very well for local groups — or even in whisper print publications?
- 🚦 Facebook giving exemptions to Ukraines urging violence against Russian invaders.
Journalism Practice
- 💨 Useful information from The Guardian about their liveblogging approach.
- 📈 Reach setting page view targets for its staff (again). I have a post in progress about this one.
- 🤑 Newsquest says that “hundreds” of its journalists are getting page view bonuses.
- 🛑 Reach carries on killing its offices
- 🏨 Some publishers using hoteling software to manage how their workforce use office space.
- 🧠 Reporting sensitively on neurodiversity.
Newsletters
- 📧 Five tips for making newsletters that stick (eeeew…)
- 🎙 Interesting Media Voices interview with Ryan Heafy of newsletter-based local media company, 6am City.
- 🔎 The Manchester Evening News launches a newsletter looking to highlight stories which might get missed.
- 🔥Substack under fire again — this time for profiting from COVID-19 misinformation
- 🌍 How publishers are using newsletters to reach international audiences.
- 👓 I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Substack has a reader app now. I wrote about it, too…
Don't take on The Mill 📉📉 pic.twitter.com/eSqJa5QyiR
— Joshi Herrmann (@joshi) March 1, 2022
Platforms
- 🐣 The NYT looks at how Twitter is reinventing itself.
- 🎉 Here’s a round-up of the new Twitter features coming.
- 💪🏼 And this is a surprisingly useful guide to actually using Twitter better.
- 🌅 Social Media Image sizes cheat sheet
- 🙈Trump Social, sorry, Truth Social struggling out of the gates.
- 🍿 TikTok is going long, if you like it or not…
- 🎦 Don’t give up on Reels just yet.
1/ Stop saying TikTok is “usually just an app for memes and dancing, not serious issues.” Remember when TikTokers supposedly trolled a Trump rally? That was 21 months ago.
— Abbie Richards (@abbieasr) March 7, 2022
TikTok's been a political tool for as long as it's been used by people who care about political issues.
SEO
- 👨🏻💻 Setting up Google Publisher Centre
- 🕵🏻♀️ Why does all the really interesting stuff end up on the later pages of search results?
- 💻 The desktop version of the Core Web Vitals rollout is done.
Verification
- 🔎 A nice summary of how journalists are verifying Ukraine videos
- 🤥 Scam pages are trying to capitalise on the attention generated by the Ukraine invasion
- ✋🏻 Facebook blocking new Crowdtangle sign-ups
- 🔬 Useful guide from the ever-excellent Bellingcat to archiving content from Telegram
The lack of attention in big tech companies like @Meta @Twitter @Google in terms of content moderation, verification and overall better signalling of trusted actors in smaller countries - in this case European - makes it that much harder to verify claims during this crisis.
— Sofia Diogo Mateus (@sofiadmateus) February 26, 2022
The Big Read: We’re not storytellers
Journaolism lecturer lazy cliché #378: “We are storytellers!”
Well, maybe we're not, Maybe journalism is something different…

Chaser:

The Big debate: do paywalls create a moral problem?
This one really isn't going away any time soon. The more membership models we have, the more people are excluded from the high-quality news ecosystem. But there won't be a high-quality news ecosystsm without membership models.

Every “high petrol prices” news package
This made me chuckle. Not quite as good as the old Newswipe parody, but getting there.