How AI can help publishers reach 'increasingly fragmented audiences'

This is a little different than my normal newsletter, but I want to take some time in the newsletter to pay tribute to Mandy Jenkins. She was digital journalism pioneer but also someone who inspired everyone she met, including me, with her humanity. Unfortunately, the industry, the world, her family and her husband lost her far too early, at 42 after a four-year battle with cancer. I first met Mandy in 2010 when I was in Washington DC for the Online News Association conference there. In addition to the conference, I did a story about TBD.com for The Guardian. Her manager, the late great Steve Buttry, introduced me to his team members. Mandy was one of several young digital journalists who would go very far in their careers. She went on to be the editor-in-chief of Storyful, a Knight fellow at Stanford and also the editor of McClatchy's Google News Initiative-funded Compass Project.

She did so much in her career in such a short time, and much like Steve, she had to roll with the ups and downs of the industry. TBD.com ran into trouble within months after its launch. Her move to Digital First Media with Jim Brady and Steve Buttry also ended when the company pivoted away from its centralised New York City newsroom - Project Thunderdome. The Compass project was a victim of a challenging year for McClatchy, and Mandy lost her job again.

Despite it all, Mandy maintained a positive, can-do attitude that would have broken most people. And then, she faced another challenge, cancer. I thought she had beaten it, and then I saw a fundraiser in January asking for funds to pay for a long-distance ambulance ride so that she could go home to Ohio to spend her last days with her family there. The digital journalism community rallied and not only paid for her last journey home but also tens of thousands of dollars for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Journalism not only lost an incredible leader, but the world lost a shining light. Steve, who we also lost to cancer, and Mandy will inspire me to continue to keep pushing the envelope for innovation in journalism but also to do it with humanity and grace.

And now back to our regularly scheduled newsletter. David Caswell, executive product manager at the BBC, explains how AI can help media reach fragmented audiences. AI can help us produce different versions of the same content so that it is relevant to different audiences.

A report from Echobox benchmarks how different social media platforms perform when it comes to driving traffic back to websites. It's an important bit of research that helps journalism leaders connect off-platform activities to audience development on-platform.

Tributes to Mandy

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