As audiences increasingly consume news on their phones, through their inboxes and elsewhere, learning how to package and deliver that content effectively becomes an ever-urgent priority. Learn from the folks who’ve studied audience behavior scientifically and collaborated with their peers in other roles to learn new approaches. These sessions range from how to master newsletter audience-building to expert advice on Snapchat Discover or Instagram and Facebook Stories, and you’ll walk away more prepared to captivate your audience than ever before.
Take a closer look at our Business Revenue and Ethics track:
Building Great Newsletters and Email Tools How do you build an audience when you’re inside someone’s inbox? Speakers Megan Hess, Mobile and Emerging Platforms Editor at Bloomberg, Jacque Boltik, Consultant at Kingrail Consulting, and Matt Kiser, Founder of WTF Just Happened Today, tell you how with info on audience identification and growth, workflow, plus how analytics can inform your strategy.
Stories are the New Story: Making Vertical Content Work This is a how-to session on putting out vertical content, such as Snapchat Discover, Instagram and Facebook Stories. You’ll hear tips on reader behavior patterns such as eye movement, content placement and story timing and see templates and demonstrations that speakers Fernanda Braune-Brackenrich, Snapchat Producer and Editor for The New York Times, and Jake Grovum, U.S. Social Media Editor for The Financial Times, have developed that include a mix of text, graphics and video.
What Product and News Designers Can Learn From Each Other News designers and product designers are each trying to reach audiences through good design, and this session is devoted to seeing how the unique insights each role possesses can help the other. They’re tough jobs: News designers are expected to know how to code, art direct, illustrate and elevate storytelling across every format and medium available (sometimes including print, which requires a whole different skillset!). Contrarily, newsroom product teams need to understand the product that they’re tasked to improve: the cycle, the needs, the users or the reach. Speakers include Emily Chow, Design Editor at The Washington Post, and Jessica Gilbert, Digital Creative Director at McClatchy.
Pushes of Note: Best Practices in Mobile Notifications [Sponsored by Knight Foundation] As notifications continue to be a major source of traffic, the art of crafting a perfect push alert is evolving every day. Emily Bell and Pete Brown of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism will speak with Sasha Koren and Sarah Schmalbach of the Guardian Mobile Lab about their extensive study of newsrooms’ use of mobile notifications through content analysis, focus groups and interviews with newsroom mobile team staff. They’ll share current best practices, where there are opportunities for improvement and address the ongoing challenges faced in the rapidly evolving area of mobile news consumption.
Table Talks: Mobile Tools + Design Consistently considered one of our most popular events, our Table Talks are designed to get into the meat of a topic, so you can discuss the details of what you’ve been working on with top minds in the field. Join this two-hour intimate discussion to talk about challenges you’ve faced and strategies you’ve employed to solve them. No preparation is necessary — this is an extremely interactive event and we encourage everyone interested to participate. Note: Topics will be announced closer to the conference and we are not taking questions for speakers in advance, since these are participatory conversations.