Business
RJI Fellow’s ongoing e-newsletter personalization experiment yields surprising results
Tracy Clark, a 2015-2016 RJI Fellow, believes newspapers with editor-selected email newsletters would have better engagement rates if the content were personalized to each user’s interest. She is in the midst of a pilot study with a large U.S. newspaper, which is simultaneously publishing two email newsletters: one includes editor-selected news content, the other features reader-selected stories. The personalized newsletters are based on Clark’s Reportory platform. This is a progress report.
The student-innovator: Thinking beyond classes to creating supports for student entrepreneurs
I taught my first “media entrepreneurship” class in 2001, nearly 15 years ago. It was the first time I’d introduced these concepts into my college’s journalism education program. My goal was to not only introduce new content management technologies (FrontPage and Dreamweaver at the time), but to help students utilize the deep skills in writing, audio, … Continued
RJI Fellowship team will use technology to bring more citizens, journalists into the council chamber
As newsrooms shrink in size, so does the amount of meeting coverage, says Mike Wheeler, a member of an RJI Fellowship team working to make meeting deliberations more accessible and “on demand” to journalists and citizens. He is a managing partner for Westerly Partners. Local government transparency is crucial to a community’s well-being, he says. … Continued
5 lessons from Corey Ford for every entrepreneur
The following are highlights from Corey Ford’s presentation at the Collaboration Culture Symposium March 21 at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Ford is the co-founder and managing partner of Matter, a startup accelerator that focuses on supporting media-based companies. Its accelerators are located in San Francisco and New York City 1. Storytelling is the … Continued
Corey Ford: Using a Collaborative Experimental Culture to Drive Innovation
Corey Ford, Matter Corey Ford is the co-founder and managing partner of Matter, a startup accelerator for entrepreneurs building scalable media ventures that create a more informed, connected and empowered society. Matter invests seed capital and provides intensive support through a human-centered, prototype-driven startup accelerator in San Francisco. Prior to Matter, Ford built Runway, a pre-team, … Continued
Khari Johnson: Crowdfunding Beyond the Money
Khari Johnson, Through the Cracks Khari Johnson is a staunch believer in journalism, community, entrepreneurship and bringing underreported stories to light. He’s founder and editor of Through the Cracks: Crowdfunding in Journalism, a news website that monitors crowdfunding platforms to share stories that enable reporters and storytellers. Through the Cracks is a social enterprise whose coverage … Continued
Kristina Halvorson: Content/Communication
Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic Kristina Halvorson is widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy. She is the CEO of Brain Traffic, the coauthor of “Content Strategy for the Web” and the founder of the Confab content strategy conferences. Halvorson’s work focuses on the complex processes, people, and policies that create the … Continued
Wide world of content
I have to admit that I’m a bit of a hypocrite. One of the reasons I built my online news aggregation platform Reportory two years ago was my great frustration in paying for multiple, nonpersonalized (neither the content nor the ads) wasteful print newspapers and news magazines. I cancelled all of my print subscriptions and … Continued
Structured journalism puts consumers in control of news
In September I wrote about the economics of structured journalism, highlighting the potential for newsrooms to rebundle news as value-accumulating networks of structured information. But what is the market for structure? Why would news consumers want such a radically different way of formatting and consuming news? Why would customers care? Choice. Article-centric journalism has traditionally … Continued
Undergoing the great entrepreneurial pivot
Many entrepreneurs find themselves pivoting at some point during their entrepreneurial journey. Even some of the leading tech companies today pivoted in their early days: Instagram initially was a check-in service called Burbn; Facebook was FaceMash, asking users to rate which person was hotter; and YouTube was a video dating site. Whether pivoting sales strategy, … Continued