Facebook’s News Feed, BuzzFeed’s Identity Crisis, The Highs and Lows of Viral Content, Newsweek’s and New York’s Contrasting Print Strategies, Women in Media: Hiring News and More, Two TFP DPS Tips, TFP’s Infographic Pick of the Week
Welcome to TFP’s weekly roundup of interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world. This week, we’re looking at Facebook’s news algorithm, the pros and cons of BuzzFeed’s viral content model, our latest DPS Tips, and more.
- Citing stats that indicate average referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has increased by more than 170% in the past year, Facebook announced additional changes to how it determines what content appears in its news feeds. The update to Facebook’s algorithm aims to weed out content like meme photos in favor of “high-quality articles.”
- BuzzFeed’s photo memes and “listicles” helped it attract more than 130 million unique visitors in November. Though BuzzFeed is better known for its viral posts, NPR noted that BuzzFeed “is in the process of building up a team of journalists to offer original news reporting,” and Nieman Journalism Labs profiled BuzzFeed World, an international news endeavor.
- If you’re a publisher who wants your content to go viral — and you do, don’t you? — Gawker Editor Neetzan Zimmerman has shared his strategy for identifying viral content. But meanwhile, Pando Daily’s Bryan Goldberg explains why viral content is a risky long-term business model for content producers like BuzzFeed that rely heavily on Facebook for traffic.
- Speaking of viral content, last week several news organizations helped TV producer Elan Gale’s live-tweeted account of an altercation on a Thanksgiving Day flight go viral. Thing is, Gale made the whole thing up. The incident has made media analysts reflect on how alarmingly easy it is to fool the media with an Internet hoax.
- Newsweek, which became a digital-only publication in January, has announced that it will resume publishing a weekly print edition early next year. Newsweek was sold by Daily Beast owner IAC/InterActiveCorp to IBT Media in August. Meanwhile, New York Magazine announced that it’s decreasing its print issue frequency and becoming a biweekly.
- Visit TFP’s Women in Media blog for our latest roundup of hiring news highlighting women’s roles in the evolving media landscape. Find out what’s happening at Roll Call, Yahoo, Mental Floss, InStyle, CJR, Cosmo, Marie Claire, and Women’s Health, and more.
- Check out this week’s Adobe DPS Tip, which explains how to configure the Content Viewer for Web. If you missed last week’s tip over the Thanksgiving holiday, you’ll find that post on using the Folio Producer Editor on the TFP blog.
- Our Infographic Pick of the Week includes advice about developing effective social media pages, including what types of information you’ll want to provide on each page, as well as the standard image dimensions to use for each. And don’t miss last week’s pick, which provided a roundup of some of the most effective approaches to content marketing.
This Week in Publishing appears every Friday on the TFP blog. Every week we compile interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world and put together a wrap-up to help our readers stay up-to-date. Think we missed something great? Leave a comment below and let us know!
Posted by: Gina Barrett