The Content Strategist
With so many eyes on the tournament, there are also a lot of visualizations for analyzing every part of the game, from the initial pairings right down to predicting the most likely winners. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting out there.
I’ve learned that great editors work the sidelines to make writers into stars. Or at least, that's what they used to do. The crucial relationship between editors and writers doesn’t have to change. But as with all aspects of the media business, an editor’s role has to evolve in order to survive.
Data journalism is all the rage; for evidence of that, look no further than the fact that Columbia University’s Tow Center for Journalism devoted an entire conference to it this past Friday. But what impact is data actually having on the industry?
There may have been some things you missed over Memorial Day Weekend: the chance to partake in three days of debauchery on Fire Island; that Instagram of your boss doing tequila shots on the boardwalk at 11 AM that he smartly deleted the next day; and the latest and greatest from the wild world of content marketing.
“Data science” is the buzzword du jour, with marquee publications such as The New York Times hiring physics Ph.D.'s to shuffle through haystacks of information and find the needles that will unlock major stories. But not all publishers have those resources at their disposal—and not all content strategists have advanced degrees in probabilistic theory. Still, there are plenty of data-science tricks that can help those on a shoestring budget.
From hot digital upstarts to the media old-guard, a clear trend emerges: data is quickly changing the way journalists tell stories.
When the Times launched their paid post campaign last June, metrics showed that readers spent roughly as much time on paid posts as editorial content. The publication's successful native advertising campaign shows that great stories, no matter where they come from, engage wider audiences.
How big a deal is the leaked New York Times Innovation Report? According to Nieman Lab's Joshua Benton, it brought at least one Times staffer to tears. The weeper in question cried, as Benton says, "because it surfaced so many issues about Times culture that digital types have been struggling to overcome for years."
Netflix and Gawker's joint project is book club-meets-online forum, and it could be the start of something big for digital entertainment.
