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Lessons on using WhatsApp for publishing – an election experience | Online Journalism Blog
“During this year’s general and local elections a collection of my Birmingham City University students used WhatsApp to publish regular updates throughout the two days of voting. Frankly… they nailed it. In the process they learned a lot, so I thought I’d share some of the things that came up throughout the process – as well as the experiences of the person responsible for the Mirror‘s political WhatsApp account in the week leading up to the election.
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Month: May 2015
CMS? It’s SEP
I was talking recently with a scarily smart colleague recently about what content/tech/social/CMS might look like in 2018, and I realised I was getting stuck around trying to jam new ideas of onto existing platforms.
Way back when, in the heyday of print, everyone owned a printing press and managed their own platforms and distribution.
In the 90’s I joined one regional newspaper company (now best known for its subbing hubs) it had invested £60m in a new press, and I was given a tour of the facility after my interview by the managing director*.
Today, so many services are bought in and there’s no thought of not dealing with a competitor on a commercial basis.
Presses are hired (when I was editor of the Daily Post, we used to groan when we had to wait for the press to finish the Daily Mail at the Oldham plant), distribution transport for newspaper bundles are contracted out… the business end of getting the Legacy Product to market is pretty well established as buy-what-you-need.
Digital, though, is another matter. Everyone probably has their own purpose-built CMS, adapted to their own unique needs (albeit needs may well be outstripped by technology or audience/customer demands within months of the build starting).
Meanwhile, WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and other have been around as publishing platforms in their own right for years.
And more recently, we’ve seen the shift of Facebook, Medium and – just this week – Shorthand Social) to become publishing-within-a-platform for users. Plus the media/Facebook partnerships with Instant Articles is in its infancy
So is the next step to shift, as Facebook would like, away from our own platforms and onto other, hired, ones. Just like you lease a car for three years, what if you could lease a CMS?
And then, after a pre-agreed time period, you’d update to a new, shiny system that was build to robustly met the needs of user, audience, device, analytics tools de jour and a plethora of other requirements.
Suppose Facebook, Medium, Google or Twitter moved into this space – renting Rolls Royce operating systems to content creators, on revenue share deals?
It’s not a huge leap from where we are now, with Instant Articles. I’m not suggesting the news media world ready to shift from buying to renting, when it comes to housing its content, but it does make me think that when we plan the future, it’s worth factoring in ideas that maybe the delivery system could become, to borrow from the Hitchhiker’s Guide, an SEP – Somebody Else’s Problem.
* Imagine an MD having time to talk to a prospective new senior reporter nowadays, let alone give them a guided tour…
Related articles
Interesting reads (weekly)
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Au Revoir Ampp3d | Digital by Default
” Other people will write blogposts that better sum up the influence Ampp3d etc had on digital journalism in the UK – I am not qualified to do that. I will just say thank you for the inspiration, for demonstrating there was an audience for data journalism beyond the broadsheets and for the ever entertaining social media channels”
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“Every newspaper chain talks about getting digital faster. The plain truth is, that despite almost two decades of effort, most aren’t close to where they need to be. Even The New York Times can count only 28.2 percent of its ad revenue coming from digital”
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Mobile journalism kit advice from RTÉ’s Glen Mulcahy | Media news
Recommended reading for great hints. Glenn is the master.
tags: mojo phone mobile journalism
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“Instead of thinking about the constraints of mobile – of the things you can’t do because the screen is smaller and there’s no keyboard – we should rather think of the PC as having the basic, cut-down, limited version of the internet, because it only has the web. It’s the mobile that has the whole internet.”
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“Before we built qz.com, we built the Quartz API. (On day one, someone had already started playing with it.) Today the API’s primary customer remains qz.com, but it could go in all sorts of directions. Our philosophy has always been to put as little friction as possible between us and our readers, and our API is an advantage in living up to that ideal.”
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Anticipating Digital Disruption
“In order to thrive in this time of exponential change and rapid digital disruption, it is imperative to actively scan far outside of your industry looking for new ways to disrupt yourself, before others do it for you.”
Headlines and Deadlines 