Purely Technically: How Media Gets More Interesting with Developers

    image

    We have collected examples of how media attracts an audience using mathematical algorithms, robots, and other purely technical lotions.

    Each of their

    Media wins extra points if they adapt to the user.

    People often read the media for certain sections or sections. We now like “Opinions” in “Vedomosti” (And the news can be read on other sites.) The New York Times made a feature for this case: the newspaper allows you to subscribe to specific sections, and sends updates by e-mail. (Mailing lists, in general, remain underestimated in the Russian media.)

    The publication FirveThirtyEight in the DataLab section allows you to filter content by topic and collects it in one feed.

    image

    At Sports.ru, you can personalize the feed by analogy with social networks. After authorization, you subscribe to blogs and sources of interest - you receive a feed with personal news, texts and photos.

    image

    References are another way to make media more convenient. When the user has read the article, suggest another one in accordance with his interests. So the user remains on the site longer.

    Ria.ru shows the Relap widget under the materials, where mathematical algorithms personalize articles.

    image

    When the RIA began to use the recommendations, the CTR of the “Most Important Today” block rose from 12 to 25%, and the session duration increased 79 seconds to 3 minutes.

    Interactivity and responsiveness

    Information media have an eternal background dilemma. Write a short update - readers may not understand what happened. If you write the whole backstory, you will go crazy. The Washington Post embeds interactive footnotes in texts. Do not know how IS recruits people? - click and read in the sidebar an explanation or other materials on the topic. Do you recruit a soldier yourself? - read on.

    image

    Everyone loves long reads - large, detailed texts with a custom layout. Even if you don’t have your own cool admin panel, you can build a good longride on Tilda or Redimaga.

    Sweetheart:

    Vox Media posted the AutoTune tool code on GitHub - with it, journalists create graphs, slide shows, tests and other interactive materials. Everything is done based on templates.

    Lasertag is a WordPress plugin developed on the Al Jazeera hackathon, which itself selects relevant links to selected words. (For those who are too lazy to link.)

    Robots

    The New York Times loves robots. Every day, the publication publishes more than 300 materials on the site, and about 50 get into social networks. To select articles for publication, the Blossom robot appeared. He lives in the Slack messenger. A journalist asks “Blossom Facebook?” And the robot advises the material for publication.

    image

    Blossom analyzes how people respond to articles and constantly learns. Preliminary results show that materials that Blossom selected for publication collect 120% more clicks.

    The New York Times also has an editor robot that helps tag the content. (There are so many of them that no editor can choose them correctly.)

    Now services that are looking for geolocation photos posted on Instagram are in use. Long before the idea went to the people, TJ created this. They use it for reporting materials and the heading "Place on Instagram." Each issue collects at least 10 thousand views.

    When TJ was just launched, as an aggregator of the most interesting and discussed news on the Russian Internet, a robot was created that analyzes the media and Russian-language Twitter. Such tools are convenient for both website visitors and journalists: all important sources are collected in one place, and the materials are ranked by popularity on social networks or by chronology.

    image

    Admin

    “I would choose the tool for creating Snow Fall, and not Snow Fall myself,” says Quartz editor Kevin Delaney. It is important to get media not a cool special project, but technologies that will allow them to be created every day.

    The wos.ru edition is famous for its custom layout of materials. Repeating it in one of the popular CMS would be problematic. Initially, each material was imposed from scratch, but at the end of 2014 the publication restarted on the self-written CMS and even offered to test its new admin panel to everyone.

    image

    Vox Media Publishing House, which runs The Verge, Polygon, and Re / Code, took its own Chorus platform to launch a completely new media in 2014. So the Vox site from scratch was created in 9 weeks.

    Also popular now: