Data-driven Storytelling or Product-Thinking in Storytelling PLUS What Happens When a Local News Co-op Melts Down?

October 22, 2021

For your weekend reading, we have a couple of pieces diving deeply into storytelling as if stories were products. One comes from the business side and makes that case for using data to inform storytelling. It’s product thinking because it approaches the process from the point of view of creating hypotheses to test, and then coming up with ways to run the tests.

The next story is an interesting critique of a New York Times long-form piece. I think it’s really good to do deep dives on major projects like this. With data you should be able to see time on page and scroll depth. It’s important when investing so much time into projects like this to test your assumptions. As much as we like the aesthetics of projects like this, it’s really important to make sure that they resonate with audiences as much as they do with journalists and their peers. As a product manager recently said to me, if we’re creating a project to win awards, we’re creating it for an audience of 12.

Close to me here in the US, a local news co-op called the Devil Strip is facing a very uncertain future. It was one of those outlets that had been held up as the future of news. As co-owners, funders were supposed to have a say, but with almost no notice, the Strip announced that it was shutting down and laying off all nine of its staff. Read on. I worry that even if they find some stopgap funding to stay afloat that they have destroyed their credibility with their co-owners and the community.

The Art Of Data-Driven Storytelling - 10/20/2021

In light of the gradual reopening of New York City following the COVID-19 pandemic, a team of journalists and data analysts from the the New York Times attempted to summarize …

Toutiao users clock in an astounding 73.4 minutes per day, and 85% are below 35, a typically news-avoiding demographic China’s Bytedance is best known in the West for its hyper-engaging video platform TikTok. But the social media giant’s first major creation – the news aggregator Toutiao, or ‘headlines’ in Chinese – may be even more relevant …

These strategies helped me land roles early in my career at HuffPost, BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News.

What Happens When a Local News Co-op Melts Down?

The rise of the Delta variant in the U.S. has resulted in the CDC once again ramping safety precautions, which means people must keep up with the new— and rapidly changing— health mandates. And the solution to keeping people informed of these changes may just be as simple as email newsletters. A Trusted Source Email …

The Devil Strip's board of directors said on Tuesday that the site had run out of money and needed to raise $75,000 to rehire staff — but didn't explain how things got so bad in the first place.

Mediagazer presents the day's must-read media news on a single page.

Broadcasters fear Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant may gradually sideline UK content

As it rapidly expands its British newsroom, the US newspaper now rivals smaller UK national titles.

The podcast More Than This had a challenge. How could they recreate the emotions, pacing, and atmosphere of their episodes without using any audio?