Journalism | Chris Aldrich

👓 The year you actually start to like your CMS | Nieman Journalism Lab | Eric Ulken

Read The year you actually start to like your CMS by

Eric Ulken (Nieman Lab)

"If we do it right, users benefit from a feedback loop that helps make our work more valuable and relevant to them. And no journalist ever again has to wear their clunky CMS as a badge of honor."

Without saying it directly, there’s a very IndieWeb flavor to this piece. I’d love to see more journalists and technologists who are working in journalism contributing to improving the web. The Nieman Lab’s collection of Predictions for Journalism in 2019 also has some other IndieWeb-centric articles for those who might be interested.

Eric Ulken, product director for newsroom tools at the USA TODAY NETWORK, has a great list of UI elements in the article that many journalists, newsrooms, and even average people would love to see built into content management systems. I hope that as people build and iterate that they write about their experiences and open source pieces so others can use and leverage them.

Personally, I think that W3C specs like Webmention, Micropub, and Microsub can help change the tide in the coming year.

Some things your tools will soon do for you — if they don’t already:

Automatically find and link relevant background material.

Suggest topics and contextualize newly created content as part of a bigger story arc, when relevant.

Show which topics, story forms and content types, in the aggregate, are resonating with priority audience segments and help you take action based on that info.

Dynamically alert you when there’s potential for promoting your work on other platforms and help you prioritize those efforts.

Keep track of the things you’ve published, show you how they’re doing with key audiences and suggest follow-up opportunities.

Call out popular evergreen content that could use freshening.

Run headline tests and other content experiments directly from the authoring and curation environment.

Identify missed opportunities and help you find out where your content fell flat with readers.

Enable the creation of mobile-first multimedia narratives and other non-text story forms.

Help you productively interact with your audiences and help them inform your coverage.

Calculate — at the staff, team and individual level — effort spent on things that don’t serve audiences well (thereby helping you devote more time to the things that do).

Elevate your phone from in-the-field last resort to full-fledged content creation and management tool, because the best device is the one you have with you.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Today’s leading-edge content tools are integrated context, collaboration and insight machines. We’re moving from unidirectional publishing of articles to organizing all our work and closing the feedback loop with our customers. I call this “full-stack publishing”. ❧

This sounds a little bit like what the IndieWeb is building for itself!

December 21, 2018 at 08:02PM

And while content analytics tools (e.g., Chartbeat, Parsely, Content Insights) and feedback platforms (e.g., Hearken, GroundSource) have thankfully helped close the gap, the core content management experience remains, for most of us, little improved when it comes to including the audience in the process. ❧

December 21, 2018 at 08:00PM

👓 Walt Mossberg, Veteran Technology Journalist, Quits Facebook | The New York Times

Read Walt Mossberg, Veteran Technology Journalist, Quits Facebook by Daniel Victor (New York Times)

Mr. Mossberg has spent decades chronicling the privacy implications of Facebook’s policies. On Monday, he opted out.

Walt Mossberg is far from alone in giving up on Facebook. But as a leading technology journalist who has spent decades chronicling the impact of Silicon Valley’s policies, his exit from the social network speaks louder than most.

This is a HUGE silo quit! There are few who watch the technology sector so closely as Walt Mossberg has for the past several decades.

Since it will be gone soon, I’ve archived a copy of his Facebook post.

🔖 JSON-LD And You – Google Slides | Aram Zucker-Scharff

Bookmarked JSON-LD And You: A Guide to Structured Metadata for Journalism by

Aram Zucker-Scharff (docs.google.com)

A presentation on Google Docs.

Hi, I’m Aram Zucker-Scharff and now that we’re settled in, I’ll take a minute to introduce myself. I’m the Director of Ad Tech Engineering at The Washington Post, where I work with teams across the organization to help the Post make money and, through our Arc platform, help other publications make money as well. But I’ve taken a long road to this point, I started off as a journalist, then an editor, a social media manager, a product manager, a freelance strategy consultant and developer and last a full stack developer. I even spent some time being very bad at selling ads.

Aram Zucker-Scharff is about as sharp as it gets when it comes to journalism, adtech, and technology. I do wish he’d spent some additional time on Microformats (or even the v2 implementation) as they’re still broadly supported and much less likely to be treated as the flavor-of-the-month that JSON-LD and schema.org are currently.

I dug around a bit and didn’t see any video from this session.

🎧 This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese | TWIG.tv

Listened to This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese by Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham from TWiT.tv

Foldable Phone, Online Civility

The Samsung Developers Conference Keynote features a foldable phone, SmartThings IoT, and Bixby innovations.

Android will support foldable phones.

Google employees stage a walkout over sexual harassment

Tim Berners-Lee's Contract for the Web

How to encourage civility online

YouTube Content ID

Facebook and "White Genocide"

Young people are deleting Facebook in droves

Facebook's holiday pop-up store

Everybody gets free Amazon shipping

Amazon's new HQ2(s)

8 new Chromebook features

Google Home Hub teams up with Sephora

Ajit Pai's FCC is hopping mad about robocalls

Picks of the Week

Jeff's Number: Black Friday home tech deals

Stacey's Thing: Extinct cables, Alexa Christmas Lights

Leo Laporte doesn’t talk about it directly within an IndieWeb specific framework, but he’s got an interesting discussion about YouTube Content ID that touches on the ideas of Journalism and IndieWeb and particularly as they relate to video, streaming video, and YouTube Live.

While most people are forced to rely on Google as their silo of choice for video and specifically live streaming video, he points out a painful single point of failure in their system with regard to copyright rules and Google’s automatic filters that could get a user/content creator permanently banned. Worse, as Leo indicates, this ban could also extend to related Google accounts (YouTube, Gmail, etc.) One is thus open to potential chilling effects of intimidation, censorship, and deplatforming.

Leo discusses the fact that he’s not as beholden to YouTube because he streams and hosts all of his content on his own website and only utilizes silos like YouTube as ancillary distribution. In IndieWeb parlance what he does is known as POSSE or Post to your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere and this prevents his journalism, commentary, and even his business from being ravaged by the whims of corporate entities whose rules he can’t control directly.

The discussion starts at 1:05:11 into the episode and goes for about 10 minutes for those who are interested in this particular sub-topic.

This idea also impinges on Cal Newport’s recent article Is YouTube Fundamental or Trivial? which I read the other day.

👓 The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine critical of Trump, to shutter after 23 years | CNN

Read The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine critical of Trump, to shutter after 23 years (CNN)

The Weekly Standard, the magazine that espouses traditional conservatism and which has remained deeply critical of President Donald Trump, will shutter after 23 years, its owner Clarity Media Group announced Friday morning. The magazine will publish its final issue on December 17.

Alas there goes the last bit of logic to the center of the old party. Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party is almost complete.

👓 Canceling Subscriptions & Supporting Institutions | Driftless Meditations

Read Canceling Subscriptions & Supporting Institutions by

William Schuth (Driftless Meditations)

I cancelled my subscription to Foreign Policy yesterday afternoon, spurred by an email from FP about an upcoming auto-renewal charge. The quality of the print journal has been in decline for several years, no doubt due, at least in part, to structural challenges the publishing industry faces. I am sympathetic to that; I know firsthand (though at much smaller scale) how hard it is to keep a print publication going in 2018, especially when other outlets are giving similar articles away for free online. In that respect, I feel bad about this parting, because I believe sound, sensation-free journalism & well-informed editorial opinion matters, now as much (or more) than ever. Publications, like FP, that present issues in detailed, yet plain, language have an important place in our culture and provide valuable service to our society.

I hold much of the same opinion as William on this front. Even more similar I subscribe to Foreign Affairs’ competitor Foreign Policy which I’ve enjoyed and subscribe for the sole reason of explicitly giving them financial support. This idea of paying to support the things you love and use is an important one.

I also had some issues with their content management set up and particularly their lack of good RSS feeds as I’d prefer to read them digitally than in print. I actually ended up reaching out to them and worked a bit with their customer support team and their programmers to try to help them better support the types of RSS feeds that I’d like to see coming out of their Drupal platform. I’m hoping they get it all sorted out soon so that it benefits not just me, but the rest of their work. I see it as increasingly important for journalistic outlets to own their own websites, content, and at least part of their distribution on the web going forward. I’m happy that services like this are still supporting web specs like RSS until something better comes along.