It’s encouraging to see journalism returning to the idea of community being central to audience development after the decade-long detour of handing that all over to the social platforms.
But doing this well requires skill and expertise many of the organisations lack right now.
Newspapers have always come and gone. The slow crumbling of the Washington Post is a tragedy for the legacy of that once-great title.
But we need a cycle of death and rebirth more than ever in journalism. Sometimes small fires let new diversity bloom in forests – and in media.
As journalism re-embraces community as a core component of audience work, we’re going to see publishers make the cardinal sin of community management:
Believing they own the community.
You can never own the community. You can host it, sure. You can - and should - serve it.
But you never own it.
Apple dinged over low-quality, scammy-looking ads on Apple News:
Apple’s controversial partnership with Taboola to serve ads on Apple News seems to be going exactly as expected.
Shocker. Who could have predicted etc etc etc
For the last three years, I’ve been looking out over a courtyard from my desk at the university.
I’d never been in it in all that time.
Today, I finally rectified that.
I should work out there on a summer’s afternoon.
The good folks at Ghost have just ticked off a couple of items on my wishlist, with upgraded comment moderation and management.
Step by step, they’re turning this platform into the perfect audience-centric publishing platform.
Admid all the noise around AI, it’s worth remembering that there are some areas where it is unquestionably creating benefits, like early detection of breast cancer.
I lost both my parents to cancer before I was out of my 30s. I’ll cheer this use of AI every step of the way.
