12.16.22
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Apple is considering allowing side loading and third-party app stores in the face of EU legislation PLUS Revue is shutting down so the newsletter is moving

Working at a company like Pugpig where we build apps for hundreds of media brands, we keep a close eye on the app stores, and big changes could be coming as the EU rolls out new regulations. Google already allows side loading from third-party app stores. Apple is considering making a similar move by 2024 in anticipation of these new regulations. The devil will be in the details, especially when it comes to the cut that Apple might take, even for app sellers who sell outside of the app store.

There was also big news this week that will affect this newsletter. After weeks of rumours, Twitter announced that it will be shutting down Revue, which it bought last year. That is the platform that I use for this newsletter. I’ve been reviewing my options, and I’ll be moving first the newsletter first thing in the New Year. Please watch this space.

We’ve also got predictions for journalism next year, which include a call for clarity from leaders and a focus on new products. Plus, we look at the fallout from a ransomware attack at Norway’s largest local publisher. Plus industry news from NPR and Spotify.

Predictions for Journalism in 2023: newsroom leadership, product, and revenue | Media news — www.journalism.co.uk

The second installment of our annual predictions looks at the skills journalists will need in the year ahead and the news products that are likely to grow

There are predictions of a tough time ahead, but also calls to focus on products and growing revenue. On the individual level, it’s also a time to learn new skills so that you can adapt. I really appreciate Lucy Kueng’s point of view. Leaders need to focus on the must-win battles. During turbulence, clear priorities are a must.

Will Apple Allow Users to Install Third-Party App Stores, Sideload in Europe? – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com

Apple Inc. is preparing to allow alternative app stores on its iPhones and iPads, part of a sweeping overhaul aimed at complying with strict European Union requirements coming in 2024.

INMA: How can product help newsrooms connect to users? — inma.org

During Wednesday’s Webinar, INMA Product Initiative Lead Jodie Hopperton led a discussion about how product and newsrooms can work together to reach users in an increasingly digital environment.

This definitely caught my eye due to my work at Pugpig. Apple is expecting to allow side loading and third-party app stores in the EU by 2024. The move anticipates changes in EU regulation, but coverage across the internet highlight that European countries are not alone in reviewing competition in app stores.

Twitter Shuts Down Revue Newsletter Platform Following ‘Twitter Files’ Response from Former CEO | Social Media Today — www.socialmediatoday.com

Social Media Today

And this is the news that will mean that this newsletter will be moving. Expect details early in the New Year.

Rising costs force more digital innovation » Nieman Journalism Lab — www.niemanlab.org

“Those who moved fast over the past five years will come out on top, and those who didn’t will struggle, fire staff, and disappoint customers and advertisers with clunky sites, second-grade apps, and increasingly thin newspapers they’ll still try to charge the earth for.”

The introductory pull-quote sums up Peter’s points well. “Those who moved fast over the past five years will come out on top, and those who didn’t will struggle, fire staff, and disappoint customers and advertisers with clunky sites, second-grade apps, and increasingly thin newspapers they’ll still try to charge the earth for.”

“Hacks occur at the most inconvenient times”: Lessons from Amedia’s Christmas shutdown | What’s New in Publishing | Digital Publishing News — whatsnewinpublishing.com

Between December 27th – 28th last year, one of Norway’s largest media groups – Amedia – was hit by a catastrophic ransomware attack that shut down its printing presses and also impacted the company’s advertising and subscription systems. Here are the key takeaways… Editor’s Note: Our thanks to Jim Bilton of wessendenbriefing for the original …

Lots of important lessons here because the cost is extreme. “In all, it took €3 million and nine months to get back to where it was before the attack, not to mention the loss of ongoing tech development and, crucially, user trust.”

NPR cancels internships, citing economic woes | The Hill

National Public Radio on Monday said it would do away with its annual summer internship program as a cost-cutting measure. “We are seeing a worldwide set of economic challenges that have weakened the advertising industry and negatively affected media and technology companies. A major portion of NPR’s revenue comes through corporate sponsorships which are sensitive…

The US public radio broadcaster is making cuts to try to protect staffing level as sponsorship drains away as the US enters a recession.

Spotify is ending production of several of its live audio shows • TechCrunch — techcrunch.com

Spotify looks to be scaling back its live audio ambitions, as the company is ending production of several of its live audio shows.

Spotify has pinned a lot of hopes on its original spoken word content. That has mostly been podcasts, but they dipped their toe into live audio, mostly focused on sports. Some of those sports shows will remain, but a good chunk of them will be going dark.


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12.14.22
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Personalisation, audio and highly engaged in-app subscribers: Pugpig’s 2022 State of the Digital Publishing Market Report PLUS the end of the innovation team

I’ve spent the last three months elbow-deep in our data at Pugpig. We have access to the app data of more than 350 media brands who use our mobile platform, and it provides us with some unique insights from the aggregated data. We also spoke to dozens of media leaders and analysts about what the last 12 months were like and what they expect in 2023. We’ve got details about their product roadmaps for the next year, where will they be spending their innovation time, attention and resources. We’ve got details on the challenges that they are facing and what they will be doing to face them, and we’ve got data on which subscription segment is the most engaged. It’s free to download.

Plus, I’ve chosen a few of this year’s Nieman Lab predictions that caught my eye, including Cindy Royal’s look at whether news product managers need to know how to code and Gina Chua’s ongoing, positive advocacy for a rethink of journalism formats.

And we also look at Heinekin and Dentsu’s project to measure attention in their campaigns. While this is an effort in advertising, the same techniques will have an impact on journalism and content.

Pugpig 2022 State of Digital Publishing Market Report — www.pugpig.com

Where are we now and what does the future hold? We’ve created a comprehensive industry report covering the state of digital publishing.

We hope to have added to the current understanding of digital publishing, particularly on mobile. A few things stood out for me while we were doing the report. The publishers we spoke to are focused on growing their subscriber base, and to attract more subscribers and keep the subscribers that they have, they are focused on delivering more value to them – not with flashy things like AR/VR or selling NFTs – but through personalisation, the ability to tailor experiences to their loyal, paying customers. There is a lot more in the report, and I hope you take a look.

Lastly, there is an interesting piece from Interhactitives about why data journalism is disappearing in South Korea.

The innovation team, R.I.P. » Nieman Journalism Lab — www.niemanlab.org

“You might be forgiven for suspecting that news companies are more interested in appearing innovative than actually doing something new.”

This prediction more than anything speaks to how innovation teams can become isolated from the rest of the organisation, their innovations lauded but ultimately having less organisational impact than if they were core to the organisation itself.

The Economics at the Heart of the Times Union Standoff | The New Yorker — www.newyorker.com

Thursday’s walkout was part of a bitter contract dispute over wages—but the impasse poses a larger question about how the growing company should invest in its future.

Journalists want the paper not just to invest in technology, acquisitions and executive salaries, they also want a slice of the success at the paper, which has been held up as a model for how to navigate the digital transition.

Yes, journalists should learn to code, but… » Nieman Journalism Lab — www.niemanlab.org

“They’ll need to think of coding as not just a single practice, but a range of related practices.”

Cindy Royal is a giant in terms of the field of study of journalism and product management, and here she looks at the question about whether journalist and specifically journalism product managers need to learn to code. As the industry has become more technical, the answer has changed. Tech used to be far divorced from the practice of journalism, but it is now the case that the two are much more intimately linked so that journalists and product managers need deeper digital domain skills.

The traditional story structure gets deconstructed » Nieman Journalism Lab — www.niemanlab.org

“Despite huge changes in the technology of news, the structure of a story today doesn’t look hugely different from one in, say, 1932.”

Gina and I connected years ago over our blogs when she was writing about her thoughts about new journalism formats, and my wife Suw and I had plans to try something new after I took a buyout from The Guardian. It’s interesting to see how Gina is putting her ideas into practice at Semafor, and here she writes about thinking behind those ideas.

Semafor Will Generate 30% of Its First-Year Revenue From Events — www.adweek.com

The publisher, whose inaugural Africa Week begins Monday, will host 40-plus events in 2023.

And here is some thoughts about how Semafor will pay for it.

Next challenge for publishers is restoring revenue back to print levels – Press Gazette — pressgazette.co.uk

How publishers can restore revenue to print levels – media technology Q&A.

While this might be a piece from a the view of a specific technology provider, it is interesting to think about different revenue stream might be able to rebuild the revenue that media once had back in the days of print and broadcast TV and radio before streaming.

Why is data journalism waning in South Korea? – Interhacktives — www.interhacktives.com

Facing decreasing attention from outlets in a portal-oreinted media environment, South Korean data journalists seek

How the media market in South Korea has meant the death knell of data journalism there (or probably more precisely a certain kind of time-intensive data journalism).

Heineken Develops Attention Measurement Campaign With Teads And Dentsu 12/12/2022

Heineken Develops Attention Measurement Campaign With Teads And Dentsu – 12/12/2022

Twitter’s risky plan to save its ads business — www.platformer.news

Agree to personalize your ads — or else

You can pay to opt out of personalised ads, which means that the information that they gather as you sign up will be used to show you personalised ads.


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01.06.20
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Finding My Professional Tribe

I am in a reflective mood, not because it is the start of a new year or a new decade, but because a big part of my life and my Sir Izacat Mewtonwife’s life – our beloved Sir Izacat Mewton, a big cuddly tom, passed unexpectedly right before Christmas. We just buried him, and we are grieving. He was 10 and a half years old, far too young, and this more than anything in the calendar is pulling us back through a decade of memories with him and our lives together.

Ten years ago, we went to Lanzarote for New Year’s. I was still at The Guardian, serving as the digital research editor, and I hadn’t yet decided to take voluntary redundancy, a buyout.

The first 10 years of this century had been an amazing decade for me professionally. I started it working at the Washington bureau of the BBC, and then after blogging the 2004 US elections, I transferred to London to write a strategic white paper for the BBC on how it should respond to blogs and podcasts. And in 2006, I left the BBC to join The Guardian.

I was often restive during this period, trying to find a way forward professionally in a world where digital journalism career paths were about blazing new trails but didn’t have a clear or clean progression.

Kevglobal Goes Global

Not long after the New Year a decade ago, I decided to take VR (a buyout) from The Guardian. I didn’t really have a plan, but I wanted the freedom to explore. And over the past decade explore I did. I spent a good chunk of the last decade building my own business, working with dozens of media companies and non-profits in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. I trained thousands of journalists in digital journalism skills including social media, data journalism long-form storytelling as well as audience development and engagement. I worked with Al Jazeera journalists before and during the Arab Spring, and in one of my proudest moments, I worked with Tunisian journalists as they prepared to cover their first free and fair elections in three decades in 2011. I was a guest lecturer at Oxford University and LSE, and in 2017, I wrote a report on innovation management at media companies for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford.

In between working for myself, I held various full-time positions, as an editor and digital strategist with the Media Development Investment Fund, as a regional executive editor for Gannett and now as a digital managing editor with ideastream, a large regional public media group in the US.

Even friends said that I didn’t seem to have a sense of what I wanted to do. I have always wanted to create the future of media. But as for so many journalists over the past decade, my different jobs weren’t so much of a career journey as they were a forced march. With the changes in media, roles simply weren’t durable. In my last role in newspapers with Gannett, I joke that I survived the first six rounds of cuts in the 21 months I had my role but not the seventh.

With my current role in public media in the US, I have finally had the gift of stability, and I have had the opportunity within my role to plot a future. It has given me time to think about what I want to do and where the most exciting and promising future lies for me.

Over the past decade, I have discovered an entrepreneurial passion and drive that I didn’t know I had, and I have become fascinated with not only product development but also with organisational dynamics. How can I help the organisations that I work for manage change? That has been one of the constant themes of my work, and I hear it from my team at work and the teams that I have worked with during my consulting.

This is what I want to do: Develop products for changing markets and help companies re-orient themselves towards these new market opportunities. I have been developing products for more than a decade, but I know I need new skills to help organisations adapt. That’s why today I’m starting a master’s degree with the University of York in innovation management and leadership. I’m so excited to be able to do this while I continue working. I’ll be learning new skills and also being able to apply those skills in my day-to-day work.

06.24.19
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Quartz to kill its chatbot-inspired mobile app

Graffiti of a sad robot with his head hanging down
20150225 02 Sad Robot, by David Wilson, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Top of today’s newsletter: Quartz is killing its Brief app, which emulated a chatbot but was really driven by editors giving you the impression of personalisation. The emoji-filled app, allowed users to get a quick taster before deciding whether you wanted to skip the story, get a chatbot-style summary or the full story from the source – often the BBC, Reuters, the New York Times or other outlets.

I profiled the app in my Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report – Beyond the Article, Frontiers of Editorial and Commercial Innovation – on innovation and product management in 2017. Quartz originally launched with a responsive site and was very focused on serving mobile audiences while not having a mobile app. This was after the first wave of apps when a lot of news organisations launched apps but quickly found that they lost the attention wars to social media or other apps.

Quartz had decided to join the second wave of apps after realising that they wanted to get onto the lock screen of mobile users as notification use exploded. The app was really a Marmite one – people either loved it or hated it. I liked its earlier, more playful iterations. I often used an example of one of the chatbot lines as the way to write creative, audience catching push notifications. The notification was about a pop-sci story about how female Orcas that had just passed out of calving age. Quartz’s writers teased you in with the line: Menopausal sharks are bad ass. Click! Click! Click!

The Digiday story tried to read the tea leaves on why they killed the app. Was it the loss of editor Adam Pasick to the New York Times? Quartz says no. Was it the fact that the Japanese company that bought Quartz has its own news app, NewsPicks? Probably, but more than likely, it had a cult following. These days in digital media, unless you operate at a certain niche scale, small cult-ish devotion isn’t enough.

In the end, I think this probably sums up the apps death:

“Some people loved it!” one former employee said. “Just not hundreds of thousands of people.”

Quartz is shutting down its Quartz Brief mobile app July 1, by Max Willens, Digiday

To be perfectly honest, I used to get pulled in by the notifications. Then they became a little more pedestrian, and I turned them off when I was on holiday. And I never felt compelled to turn them back on, and then I can’t remember the last time I opened the app.

A couple of other notable items in the newsletter today:

And please help me sort through all of the British PM race and Trump noise right now by sending me media news of note. Drop them to me at @kevglobal on Twitter.

06.20.19
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Pivot to paid driving pivot to CRM for media companies and start-ups

Fork in the road Gypsy lane to the left, Brobury Lane to the right. by Jonathan Billinger, Wikimedia Commons, Some Rights Reserved

I had to do some digging into the stories that my network was sharing today to find this gem about Pico, one of a number of media services providers that are pivoting to provide customer relationship management (CRM) services. It may be at the bottom of the list of headlines in my newsletter today, but it tops my list in terms of personal interest.

The profile of Pico by Nieman Lab got my attention because it is connected to the conversion funnel work that I’m doing in my day job. Beginning in 2017 as I was doing more and more consulting work with media companies in Europe and Asia, I realised how important conversion funnels were as more companies shifted to paid strategies. If I had studied marketing rather than journalism, conversion funnels would be old hat, but they were something that I stumbled upon as my work with audience engagement shifted to audience development and flowed naturally to conversion to paying customers.

Back to Pico. The company started out as a micro-payments provider called PennyPass. Micro-payments (think iTunes for news – garf!) didn’t really convert many readers to subscribers, but founders Jason Bade and Nick Chen realised that that they had collected a lot of leads during the pilot.

What publishers really needed was a funnel to some sort of reader revenue, and we had been too prescriptive about that type of reader revenue.

Pico wants to inject CRM smarts into news sites hungry for reader relationships, by Christine Schmidt, Nieman Lab

Now, they are building propensity to subscribe models as well as handling a lot of other “customer-relations stuff”. They connect Mailchimp or another email service and a payment service like Stripe and link the data flowing through the site and these other platforms.

But Pico isn’t the only company making this pivot. GroundSource, which started as an SMS-based engagement platform; Steady, which grew out of KrautReporter in Berlin; and the News Revenue Hub are all shifting to this space.

Pico just landed a $4.5m funding round that includes money from Stripe and Bloomberg Beta so they have some runway to find the right model.

I would say for the public service broadcaster that I work for, we’re looking for something that integrates more effectively with other software services that we’re currently using to allow us to segment more effectively, especially when it comes to knowing who is a member and who isn’t when it comes to the users of our digital services. We believe that would be transformative for our business.

Fascinating stuff, and if you see a story that you think I should share with my readers, let me know @kevglobal on Twitter.

06.18.19
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A deep dive into Schibsted’s plan for $115m in reader revenue by 2020

Departure hall at Bergen Railway Station, Norway. Neon sign with logo of newspaper Bergens Tidende.
Departure hall at Bergen Railway Station, Norway. Neon sign with logo of newspaper Bergens Tidende, by Wolfmann, Wikimedia Commons, Some Rights Reserved

The top story in the newsletter today is a look at Scandi media giant Schibsted’s march to 1 bn NOK ($115m) of reader revenue by next year.

You need to read this piece because it challenges conventional wisdom and explains some of the thinking behind Schibsted’s nuanced and data-informed strategy. Their strategy has changed over time and is flexible enough to make allowances for the audiences and positioning of their different properties.

In terms of how their reader revenue strategy has evolved, it started simply by trying to grow their paying audiences when it launched in 2017, and then as they built the customer base, they pivoted to customer retention. And now, they are focused on “pricing, packaging, user experience and additional products, all the while keeping a steady hand on churn”.

What is really impressive is how adaptable and flexible their thinking is. They eschew the one-size-fits-all model that can be the reflexive response by some large groups. In that model, they run the same playbook everywhere. One gets the impression that this is to control costs because they don’t have the resources for multiple strategies tailored for different products.

For Schibsted, they have different models for their high volume tabloids – VG and Aftonbladet. Those properties remain mostly ad-supported. The reader revenue component is mainly to do with premium content. But for a local title, Bergens Tidende, up to 70% of the content is behind the paywall.

But they are also adding information into their model about stories that converted users to subscribers in the past. Very smart and well worth your time.

06.17.19
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How news organisations are succeeding with reader-first digital transformation

Transformation, by Cornelia Kopp, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Since 1996, in some way, I’ve been focused on digital transformation at media companies, initially as a front-line journalist but since 2005 either as an internal or external consultant in a wide range of roles. Topping my media newsletter today is the summary of a talk by Greg Piechota and George Brook about digital transformation at media organisations. They see successful digital transformation efforts not so much as being good at managing various products but rather by serving various customers.

There are a lot of great quotes in this summary, but Greg started by re-framing the issues around the pivot to paid as:

The reinvention is actually much bigger than just the change of a business model. It’s like the transformation of journalism from a mass market, industrial product to journalism as a service.

The digital transformation of newsrooms to become reader first, by Shelley Seale, International News Media Association

He walked through the model at The Guardian where the product hadn’t changed as much as the way that they captured value from various classes of users. “What they manage are not different products, but different sets of customers. Some customers want to contribute to support the mission. Some people want to pay for a certain user experience [mobile app, e-reader, etc],” Greg said.

I think his framing of how to become reader focused also made sense in terms of selling journalism as a process rather than as a product. By looking as journalism as a service to be sold instead of a product, then companies could re-orient around their “impact on the customer”, he said.

This dove-tailed nicely into a discussion with George Brock, former managing editor at the Times in London, about the role that trust played in this reader-focused, service-oriented model of journalism. Rather than summarise the entire post, I’ll highlight this cultural challenge that George highlighted in terms of making this shift to a reader-first orientation. “I think the bigger problem is that the kind of things we’re talking about involve, across both the commercial and the editorial departments, shifts of power,” he said. Indeed, and I would add that it also involves shifts within the editorial department. This is a great summary of a webinar to digest, and I’m really interested in INMA’s broader Readers First Initiative.

If you’ve got a story that you think should be in the newsletter, let me know @kevglobal on Twitter.

06.14.19
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Twitch: Publishers hop onto gaming channels for audience and insights into commenting

Final Intel Extreme Masters World Best Gamers League Of Legends – Campus Party Brasil, by Camila Cunha/indicefoto, Wikimedia

TGIF! In my newsletter today, one of the featured stories was a piece in Digiday about how and why publishers are experimenting with Twitch. Gaming is one of those hugely popular pursuits that seems to sit just outside the mainstream while also being solidly mainstream in terms of numbers and adoption.

Twitch is something that as a non-gamer punches into my feed every once and while just in terms of its size and its popularity. One of the best ways to understand Twitch for a media professional is that it’s a platform for live streaming eSports. Its stats are phenomenal, as one would expect from a platform that taps into the Attention Economy equivalent of a highly addictive drug that operates at the intersection of gaming and video.

  • More than 15 m people watch Twitch daily, according to stats from April 2019.
  • More than 404 hours of content have been streamed in the past year.
  • “The most popular streamer, Ninja, earns at least $100,000 per month from Twitch alone.”
  • It currently ranks as the 26th most popular website in the world and the 13th most popular in the US.
  • Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for a cool $970m, and its current value is $3.79 bn.
    Source: 99Firms.com

Digiday’s Kerry Flynn looked at why publishers are flocking to Twitch and their strategy on the platform. For eSports or gaming publishers, the move makes perfect sense. BuzzFeed Multiplayer, the digital publisher’s gaming channel, has some of its content available only to paying subscribers. The engagement for the content has some pretty staggering statistics, especially when you look at the amount of time that people are spending with the content. “One of Multiplayer’s most engaged streams was gameplay of ‘The Sims 4‘ and garnered more than 35,000 unique live views with more than 3,800 viewers watching for the entire three-hour stream and more than 4,300 viewers watching at once, according to the publisher.” Eeep.

But for publishers not working in the gaming space, the work is more experimental in nature. I recently watched a bit of the Washington Post’s video of one of their reporters playing a video game and interviewing Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, who also is one of the 25 members of his party running for president. It was a bit surreal for me, but I understand the Jedi mind trick of it. You get gamers to engage with political issues while a young-ish candidate plays video games. I would have to be well rested to talk about tax policy and play a video game.

But apart from tapping into this huge flood of attention, publishers are finding the comments on Twitch can be good. The Washington Post said that they found viewers asking some great questions about the Mueller report. It makes me think about whether there is a way regional publishers and broadcasters like the one I work can tap into this or if it’s just a place for national publishers who can get guests with a national profile. Lots of questions.

Well, this week is a wrap, almost. Hello to the new subscribers to the newsletter this week. If you aren’t a subscriber, you can get 10 media stories from around the world in your inbox week daily with very brief context by going to my Nuzzel profile and signing up. And if you spot a good story, let me know on Twitter, @kevglobal.

06.13.19
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Helping your newsroom fall in love with spreadsheets

Closeup of Excel Spreadsheet template to track printouts, by Texas State Library and Archives Commission, from Wikimedia

Topping my media newsletter today is a piece about how the digital transformation team at the New York Times helped their teams embrace (maybe love is too strong a word) spreadsheets.

It’s timely because it came on a day that I was helping my colleagues in public broadcasting learn how to do data journalism. Top tip from my webinar yesterday: Use Google to find spreadsheets with the data you want by adding filetype:xls (or xlsx) to your search.

Former New York Times digital editor Aron Pilhofer once told me that he could teach any journalist 80 percent of everything they would need to know about data journalism in a day. I’d agree with that, and if you can unlock the magic of pivot tables, you’ll feel like Harry Potter. It’s just magic.

But if you’re a journalist and the actual ease of use doesn’t win you over, Lindsey Rogers Cook with the Times makes this argument:

While journalists once were fond of joking that they got into the field because of an aversion to math, numbers now comprise the foundation for beats as wide ranging as education, the stock market, the Census and criminal justice. More data is released than ever before — there are nearly 250,000 datasets on data.gov alone — and increasingly, government, politicians and companies try to twist those numbers to back their own agendas.

How We Helped Our Reporters Learn to Love Spreadsheets, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Times Open

As with the training that I do with data journalism, they use Google Sheets. It’s approachable and the interface is simple while having most of the features that Excel does. Moreover, I’ve found that when working with journalists from multiple organisations that if I use Google Sheets, I can be assured that we’re all working on the same version of the software, unlike Excel. I also find Google Sheets much less daunting than the open-source versions of spreadsheet software.

At the Times, the class meets for two hours each more for three weeks. They work on projects that are directly to their work, and they also train the reporters’ editors.

I have found the most successful data journalism courses that I’ve done actually bring together people from reporting, design and even coding or development.

I’ll let you read the rest of the post, but one key thing I’ll highlight, the Times has actually released their data journalism course materials to the world on Google Docs. Wow. That’s impressive and useful.

If you have a story you think I should include in my daily media newsletter, let me know on Twitter, @kevglobal.

06.12.19
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How The Economist is using data-driven interactive Stories to grow its Instagram following

Topping my media newsletter today is a story from my friends at Journalism.co.uk on how The Economist is using interactive data Stories on Instagram to grow their following on the social media platform.

Financial publications such as The Economist and The Financial Times have long understood the power of data visualisation to engage social media audiences. This tweet by the FT in 2015 – an animation of a graphic showing the erosion of middle class income in the US – was its most popular that year.

And my friend Mark Jones with the World Economic Forum told me that by simply including a chart or a graph in a social media share that it performed 400 percent better than a simple link share.

I see this more of an evolution of a trend and a new data point that emphasises something that we already now, but it is definitely something to emulate if you are already working with data visualisation.

Thanks again to my subscribers, and if you have a story that you think should be included in the newsletter, share it with me on Twitter @kevglobal.