The Conversation's user needs-led effort to engage younger readers

I am starting to do some user needs work with consulting clients at Pugpig, and I'm keen to do more. I think it's an excellent audience-first framework that provides a way to refine a content strategy and also develop new products, and we've got a great example from The Conversation, which publishes pieces from academics on topics in the news. They used the model to achieve a goal that many publishers are trying to achieve - attracting a younger audience.

My friend Damien Radcliffe continues to provide some excellent coverage of commerce media, which is a range of approaches that merge content and retail. These tactics range from affiliate marketing to brand extensions, and he provides an update with one of his signature pieces showing how a digital media trend is playing out in five charts.

Rounding out our top-featured pieces are two items about the newsletter space, which has and continues to be a very active focus for publishers because they are key across a wide range of editorial from stand-alone products to elements of conversion and retention strategies. That plus industry news.

A detailed on how to run the user needs playbook and also how it leads to some really interesting product development.

Damian looks at the rapid rise of social commerce and also something I just flagged up this week, which is how Amazon is starting to bite into Facebook's ad business with better targeting.

Briefings, deep dives and summaries. The newsletter that you're reading falls solidly into the briefings segment. It gives me a chance to share some what I'm paying attention to, and it also serves as a good archive for media intelligence.

And this piece is definitely not a summary but a deep dive, an in-depth case study of the low-tech newsletter that has been going for 22 years. It's a detailed look at its editorial and commercial strategy.

I have to keep up with the unbroken string of AI headlines. Again with the focus on AI-written stories as opposed to all of the other applications for AI in media!?

Industry news: Media startups and eco-systems

I am a little surprised that we're seeing an NFT collection in 2023, but I think the bigger story is the brand extensions.

This story has been bubbling up for weeks now, and finally, we have some details on what exactly what Twitter will be doing with their API.

One of the earliest of Google's employees decides to step down.