Engaged Reading Time - Issue #58
Hello,
I hope you're having a good day despite the bitter weather outside. I've escaped my heating-free home study, and am working in the living room today, to try and keep warm.
I have some news for you about the future of this newsletter down below, but first, let's get on with some links.
Five essential ingredients to make your community-driven journalism more resilient
Nice, clear findings from the Engaged Journalism Accelerator. Much you can learn from here.
One to listen to
Dmitry Shishkin, chief content officer of Culture Trip, on converting subscribers, evergreen content and automated commissioning
An interesting interview with Dmitry ahead of the newsrewired conference last week.
Social media psychology
Psychological Study Of “Moral Grandstanding” Helps Explain Why Social Media Is So Toxic
It's all about the social status, you see…
Engaged Reading Digest: Memes, cancel culture and baby Yoda
Rounding up research and journalism on the role of memes in political polarisation and the radicalisation of people. Yes, this a list on links embedded in your list of links. It's links all the way down…
Stop Doing This
Headless photos increase negativity towards obese people
News images that depict obese people from the neck down increase the readers’ negative attitudes towards the obese, a team of researchers found. File under "things we do without thinking that are crappy".
Twitter launches a way to report abusive use of its Lists feature
A lot of journalists - particularly foal ones writing about politics - are on the receiving end of list misuse to facilitate brigading online. This is one way of fixing that. Just about 1,000 problems to go, Twitter…
Newsletters
How News Outlets Can Make Email Newsletters More Effective
Everyone seems to produce email newsletters these days. But not everyone is doing it well. (Guilty!) Some useful advice in here.
Podcasts
The Algorithm of You
Google is bringing news bulletins to its smart speakers in a way that's not locked to a single news provider. Could be interesting. Could be… a problem.
This is (nearly) the end. But it has been prepared for
This version of the newsletter — the paid, audience engagement-centric version — is going away by the end of the month. The platform I use for my blog — Ghost — has recently introduced two new features that I'm going to replace it with:
So, I'll be killing Engaged Reading Time as a paid product by the year's end, and launching a subscription product at One Man & His Blog instead.
If any of you chose the make the journey, you'll get more than you get here - and for less. As well as a audience engagement and digital journalism weekly newsletter for paying subscribers, you'll get access to a growing set of resources I'm building out on the web that will be paid members-only, as well as paid-members only posts on the site. And I'm investigating some ways of creating some community space, too.
Lots to do - but I'm more excited about it than I am about newsletters in isolation, so forwards!
Those of you who have been paying subscribers here will get a wee bonus as soon as I can get it set up, so watch for that in a coming newsletter…
Thanks for your support so far,
Adam
