newsrewired 7 November 2018
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When: 7 November 2018
Where: Reuters UK, Canary Wharf (30 S Colonnade, London E14 5EP).
Journalism.co.uk is pleased to announce that two prominent voices in the debate on sustainable, high-quality journalism — Rachel Oldroyd managing editor, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and Brian Cathcart, professor and founder of Hacked Off — will be joining the panel that will explore the best business models for 21st-century news organisations.
Rachel Oldroyd joined the Bureau as deputy editor shortly after its launch in 2010 and has led many of the organisation’s key projects. Before joining the Bureau she spent 13 years at the Mail on Sunday, where she ran the award-winning Reportage section in Live magazine.
The section focused heavily on human rights violations and, under her editorship, won more than a dozen media awards.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University London. A former journalist at Reuters, the Independent papers and the New Statesman, he is the author of several books, of which the most recent is ‘The News from Waterloo’.
He was a founder and the first director of Hacked Off and continues to make the case for the Leveson reforms.
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Co-creator of News With Friends joins newsrewired as a speaker
Matt McAlister, co-creator of a social app that wants to fill the space left by Facebook deprioritising news content in its News Feed, will be joining panel on new social media strategies for content sharing.
After being heavily criticised for its role in spreading ‘fake news’, Facebook announced a considerable change to its algorithm this year, which will affect the posts that audiences scroll past on their News Feed.
Since April, the social network has aimed to reduce the amount of news content in its users’ feeds, which will undoubtedly impact news organisations that have a heavy presence on the platform, such as the BBC News, which has more than 47 million page likes, or CNN, with an audience of 30 million likes.
Although it is too early to asses the impact of these changes, it certainly creates a gap in the news-sharing market that may benefit new, smaller players.
Matt McAlister, CEO of media research company Kaleida, is behind the launch of News With Friends, an app that does exactly what it says on the tin: allowing the public to follow the news and share it with those they know.
“We noticed Facebook’s impact on news beginning to decline in May 2017,” says McAlister.
“The cause for all this is unclear. One possible explanation is that the decline was already happening organically through negative network effects and so Facebook put a spin on the trend to make it appear intentional.
“Another possible explanation is that Facebook eased down news engagements via the algorithm and made the announcement when the trend was apparent to everyone.”
Regardless, Kaleida knew from their research that people were actively looking for news and they like using platforms to discover stories, so Facebook’s departure from news opened a window for launching the new app.
News With Friends uses an algorithm which ranks stories based on editorial choices Kaleida observes from leading publishers; through their tools which put stories in context and enable people to compare and contrast views; and via the social features that fuel informed and intimate conversations.
“We’re collecting links to articles from the leading news publishers. Our tools analyse them and integrate more data which we use to promote their links in context in the app. We then send readers directly to the publishers’ mobile web sites to engage with the full story there,” explains McAlister.
The app hasn’t got any “like” or “react” functions. Readers share stories in a chat with their contacts on News With Friends.
“People in the chat can continue to share more stories together and to talk about anything there. As it’s a private space, the chat can feel like having coffee with someone and talking about what’s going on in the world today,” he adds.
The app also offers the option to send links to articles via email or any other mobile app.
“News With Friends integrates the news discovery and social news experiences into one thing. Some of my friends and family have shared stories with me here that I never would’ve seen otherwise. I’m getting news from way outside my filter bubble, stories that are important to people I know from sources I never read. It makes it easier to understand their views,” concludes McAlister.
It’s live in the App Store.
Matt McAlister is an experienced innovator and entrepreneur in media tech. He has led the digital business at print publications, developed open data initiatives at big media companies, and has started new companies in the news space.
Newsrewired workshop: how to cultivate thriving online communities through social stories
We are pleased to announce that Hannah Ray, head of social strategy and storytelling at Vogue International, will be leading a workshop at our upcoming newsrewired conference on 7 November 2018 at Reuters, London.
Can AI replace editors in the newsrooms?
“When you think about a creative process of selecting an image to match a story, it’s a much harder problem to try to solve with computers,” said Getty Images senior vice president of data and insights Andrew Hamilton in an interview with journalism.co.uk
But having developed an artificial intelligence-powered picture editor that chooses the right imagery for your story after “reading” your article — just as a human picture editor would — is it time to give robots a place in your newsroom?
Speakers from BBC Africa and Press Association are joining newsrewired
With only seven weeks to go until the next newsrewired event, we are pleased to announce three new speakers joining our panels.
Harriet Oliver and Julie Taylor are joint editors of a recently-launched BBC news programme for children in Africa, What’s New. Aimed at 11-16 year olds, the informative and entertaining show also gives young people the chance to tell their own stories.
New speaker announcement: Amanda Michel, deputy membership editor, the Guardian
More people are paying for Guardian journalism than ever before.
The Guardian has grown from 15,000 members in January 2016 to over 570,000 regular paying supporters, members and subscribers in June 2018. It also received an additional 375,000 one-off contributions globally in the past 12 months.
We are pleased to announce that Amanda Michel, the Guardian’s global contributions director and project manager, will be joining us as a speaker at the next newsrewired conference on 7 November 2018.
Two new speakers announced for newsrewired panel on getting Gen Z engaged with the news
With less than 10 weeks to go until the next newsrewired digital journalism conference, taking place on 7 November at Reuters in London, the Journalism.co.uk team is pleased to announce two more speakers joining us on the day.
McKenna Grant is a London-based Snapchat senior content editor at the Telegraph. Her team implemented a brand-new Snapchat editorial strategy at the newspaper in June 2017 and now the Telegraph’s Discover platform attracts an average of over one million daily unique viewers.
Vogue International’s Sarah Marshall to keynote at Journalism.co.uk’s next Newsrewired conference
We are pleased to announce that Sarah Marshall, head of audience growth at Vogue International, will be our keynote speaker at the upcoming newsrewired conference in November.
Audience growth is the key aim of every news organisation. Figuring out not only who follows your content but who will pay attention to it next is key for staying on top of your game.
Since Facebook changed its news feed algorithm, it has become harder for news organisations to gain traffic from platform shares.
In her keynote speech at newsrewired in London on 7 November 2018, Sarah Marshall will share her best tips on widening your pool of readers and spotting new trends in content sharing.
She will talk data, key performance indicators (KPIs), plans and targets; patterns in traffic and reader behaviour; the Facebook algorithm and the growth of search; and how Vogue is engaging audiences on Instagram and Snapchat.
Ellen Stewart, head of content at the world’s most-read LGBT media platform, PinkNews, joins opening panel on Gen Z
The opening panel at the newsrewired conference will explore what the younger generation (13-24) who never knew life without smartphones wants from news organisations.
The panellists will look at how to get the Gen Z engaged with your brand and, crucially, make them stay so you get ahead of your competition.
Ellen Stewart, head of content at the world’s most-read LGBT media platform, PinkNews, specialises in audience development and editorial campaigns. For the last three months, she has acted as launch Snapchat editor, with PinkNews becoming the first LGBT+ outlet to publish to Discover.
She previously worked at the Evening Standard as acting growth editor and head of social, where she built an audience team from the ground up and successfully delivered double-figure growth across social and SEO.
Announcing the agenda for the next newsrewired conference
The next newsrewired digital journalism conference will take place on 7 November 2018 at Reuters in Canary Wharf, London.
Over the past couple of weeks, the Journalism.co.uk team has been working on the programme for the event, and we’re pleased to announce our first session ideas we are currently developing.
The tickets (£190+VAT) give you access to the full-day conference on Wednesday 7 November 2018 and include lunch and refreshments, as well as after-event networking drinks and a delegate ‘goodie’ bag.
One of the key sessions of the day will be a discussion about what Generation Z (13-24) wants from news organisations.
From designing mobile-first, shareable story formats, to publishing on popular and lesser-known social platforms, the panel will explore how to adapt news content for the swipe-savvy Gen Z.
Slides and audio from newsrewired, 11 July
Journalism.co.uk’s latest newsrewired conference took place on 11 July at Reuters in London. Delegates heard from expert speakers from around Europe, learning from their experiences leading projects for media organisations including The Economist, Quartz, BBC, The Financial Times, Politico, and many more.
If you missed the event or if you want to share a part of the experience with your colleagues, this post will help you revise the resources and lessons presented during the day.
Journalism.co.uk has compiled a selection of slides and audio recordings from the sessions, as well as blogs written by our great team of volunteers at the event.
Turning engaged readers into super-engaged readers: Advice for creating a successful newsletter strategy
The email newsletter is seeing a resurgence in popularity, having experienced a slow period as the news world went through a “method-of-the-year” style approach to audience engagement as hype for new concepts came and went.
From RSS to curation to social media it became easy to overlook the humble newsletter, but doing so means doing yourself a severe disservice.
At newsrewired, we gathered a panel with representatives from organisations known for their high quality and popular newsletters, chaired by Federica Cherubini, international head of knowledge sharing at Condé Nast International.
The article is a compilation of the various strategies, approaches, experiences and tips from the panel.
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