tl;dr: the Facebook-lite edition

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.

Facebook

• 👥 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…

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.

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 Big Read: We’re not storytellers

Journaolism lecturer lazy cliché #378: “We are storytellers!”

Well, maybe we're not, Maybe journalism is something different…

Why journalists should think twice about calling themselves “storytellers” in today’s partisan environment

Journalists often brand themselves as “storytellers” to signal their reporting expertise. But in new research, Brian Calfano, Jeffrey Blevins and Alexis Straka find that because of the …

USAPP

Chaser:

Should journalists call themselves ‘storytellers’?

Plus: On the ground with journalists in Mexico, the digital divide among investigative journalists, and why ESPN became politicized

RQ1Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis

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.

The moral dilemma of paywalls: Why journalism will increasingly move into two different worlds

By Alexandra Borchardt, Medieninsider.com

MediumMedieninsider

Every “high petrol prices” news package

This made me chuckle. Not quite as good as the old Newswipe parody, but getting there.