DISEÑO DE UN SERVICIO DE ORIENTACIÓN UNIVERSITARIA

Key concepts

• Search

• Sharing

• Ampliication

• Referral trafic

• Social media optimisation (SMO)

• Filtering

• Aggregation

• Analytics

• Search engine optimisation (SEO)

• Curation

Overview

Social media have fundamentally shifted the way news producers and users share content.

There are myriad ways content can now be distributed to multiple platforms, from feeds to hashtag streams, social networks and links. Distribution strategies form a crucial part of affirming news as a process rather than a finished product, allowing content to ‘live’ on self-publishing and collaborative platforms way beyond the reach of traditional outputs. This chapter will look at the ways in which new technologies allow users to aggregate, organise and share content, and how this is both a challenge and an opportunity for journalists.

Springboard

• Navigating abundance: information used to be scarce, expensive, institutionally orientated and designed for consumption. Now it is abundant, cheap, personally orientated and designed for participation. In a landscape of unlimited information, users rarely come to content from a home page. Instead they search for content or have it come to them.

• Search engine optimisation (SEO): having good return results on search engines can improve the performance of content by ensuring it is found by interested audiences.

• Social media optimisation (SMO): more and more users discover news via social media, recommended or passed to them from their network. News sites can use social media to gain traction and are employing increasingly sophisticated strategies to bring traffic to their sites. Effective distribution on social media is facilitated by bridges and hubs – those people who add context to make sense of raw information or pass information on from one small network to another.

• Strangers and friends: stories increasingly live on beyond fixed-distribution strategies on social networks through sharing and recommendations. Strangers help us find and prioritise information but friends contribute in making it relevant to us in a way that makes us take note.

• Themes, not publications: media can be unbundled and rebundled to create a personal publi-cation. Users can easily aggregate and select content into categories that make sense to them.

Native audiences to social media think in themes, not publications.

Introduction

Distribution

How to get content in front of audiences has become more complicated, as content can be pushed, pulled and re-purposed at almost every level of the production process. Distribution strategies play an integral part in rebooting journalism.

Much of traditional distribution paired well with linear newsgathering because it was a logical sequence of sourcing, producing and then packaging news for defined audiences. If you were in the print business, you printed an edition, bundled it up and sent it out in your delivery van. If you were a broadcaster, you recorded and packaged a broadcast and people watched or listened, as detailed in Figure 5.1. To quote from A.J. Liebling: ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one’ (1960). The sheer logistics of the printing or broadcasting process were sufficient barriers to entry to protect news organisations as an industry.

But in a networked environment, Big Media have lost their monopoly on distribution as social media offer new and speedier ways to find and discover content. Finite news outputs have become infinite. Now, output to one organisation can become input to another. Distribution happens at a grassroots level as well as at an institutional one.

Social media have facilitated a shift towards decentralised news operations. Audiences have the power not only to search, read and write on the web but also to share and distribute content they choose. Anyone can produce, edit and distribute content. There are thousands of tools and sites to upload content, send and share.

In some ways, harnessing the power of the people to act as the distributors is nothing new. People always passed on newspapers (newspaper circulation has always counted both copies sold and copies read, acknowledging that sharing the paper is a fundamental part of the distribution model for that medium), or told friends about a story they have just heard on the radio. The Metro newspapers, published in city centres across Europe, built a successful business model using commuters – their readers – to do the distributing for them. Replicating this process of sharing has simply been made easier and more instant by digital technologies.

Users also navigate the social news environment differently and much of the future of good jour-nalism depends on working out how best to predict and respond to multiway consumption. Audiences expect to receive information in a bespoke way at a time that suits them: content on demand. Social media facilitate a place for users in a rolling process of journalism rather than being passive consumers thereof.

Syndication

There are different types of syndication but most trade on how content produced by one organisation is made available to another. It could be individual programmes, articles or feeds. Tweetminster, for example, generate Twitter feeds relating to certain topics and syn-dicate them.

As such, distribution strategies have to take into consideration a range of new factors:

• stories are spread faster than ever and the crowd is in control of what comes to the fore, not the editors.

• Search engines play an important role in users finding and discovering content based on keywords.

• Aggregation, linking and syndication allow for content to be unbundled and rebundled into bespoke packages.

• Curation allows editors to offer added value in the distribution of content selecting, filtering or prioritising.

• Distribution is increasingly influenced by social media, where friend recommendations and refer-rals to content come from social networks.

• Individual journalists have their own capacity to distribute content to the network through their expert use of social media.

FIGURE 5.1 Linear newsgathering paired well with linear distribution.

Sources Journalists Distribution Consumers