Instagram Lawsuit, Newsweek Ends Print, New Year Content Changes

The Strategist picks the day’s most relevant and interesting stories about the world of content from around the web. Here’s what you should be reading today:

Instagram Facing Class Action Lawsuit

According to Mashable, last week a class action lawsuit was filed against Instagram in a federal court in San Francisco following its service term changes.

An Instagram user in California, Lucy Funes, brought on the lawsuit, claiming breach of contract. It states, “In short, Instagram declares that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law and if you don’t like it, you can’t stop us.”

Say Goodbye to Print Newsweek

The Wall Street Journal reports that Newsweek will no longer be in print after 80 years following its Dec. 31 issue. The cover of the magazine features a photo of its building in Manhattan with the hashtag #lastprintissue.

Subscriptions to the new Newsweek Global, which is online, will be $4.99 per copy or $24.99 per year. The print edition shut down because of declining subscription and advertising rates.

Content Writing in the Next Year

Business2Community’s David Goehst writes about how content writing will change in 2013 and what marketers should be aiming for in the coming year.

Content must have purpose and be written by professional writers and freelancers. Content developers need to be on the same page as business developers and marketers, otherwise it’s a waste of time.

“Research before writing, even if that research takes you offline into your library, performing live interviews or the like. Never copy others’ work, either; it will eventually catch you in the end.”

Link Building and Content Marketing Face Off

Web Talent Marketing reports on link building and content marketing and weighs which one is more valuable.

Instead of paying for SEO and putting out a bunch of content that isn’t helpful, “it should instead be your goal to provide something of value to your site’s visitors, which makes them want to share this information with their friends, their site’s visitors, and so on.”

Over the past year on search engines, the keywords “link building” have declined and “content marketing” has risen. Marketers now can do real marketing, and not try to figure out the “game of Google.”

Netflix Fails on Christmas Eve

The Wall Street Journal also reports that Netflix wasn’t working on Christmas Eve after there were technical problems at Amazon.

Video streaming was down on numerous playing devices and was restored on Tuesday morning. This is the third major outage from Amazon’s web provider service. Earlier in the year, a glitch caused the malfunctioning of Pinterest, Instagram and Foursquare as well.

Musician Donates Toys through Eventful Poll

Darius Rucker, former leader of Hootie and the Blowfish, turned to Eventful’s social platform Demand It “to ask fans where [he] should purchase $10,000 worth of toys to donate,” according to ClickZ.

Five thousand votes were tallied on DemandIt, Twitter, and Facebook, and in the end, Lindenhurst, New York was the winning city.

Essentials for Content Marketing in 2013

Michele Linn of Content Marketing Institute put together a list of what content does well, and what marketers should be tapping into in 2013. 

She says that content marketing and social media are two distinct disciplines to be studied, that marketers need to learn how to keep track of content suggestions via a dashboard, that a content marketing mission statement is necessary, and that B2B marketers are using LinkedIn the most, while B2C marketers are on Facebook.

In addition, article titles can make or break content, Slideshare will increase the value of content, and the website-first mentality is dying out.