✅ Monday briefing: Changing newsrooms, journalism booming, media plurality, Socially Mobile deadline, industry data, AI in PR report, and more...

Media, industry, research and insight, social media and platforms, and tools

This newsletter is crowdsourced each week from my blog and community of practice for people studying and working in marketing, media and PR. It’s a hive mind, newsroom and source of information, help and support.

Media

🔀 CHANGING NEWSROOMS: COVID-19 continues to impact news media. Organisations are redesigning offices, upgrading technology, and renegotiating contracts with employees to accommodate greater levels of flexible working. The Reuters Institute Changing Newsrooms 2021 report is based on a survey of 132 senior industry leaders from 42 countries. Spotted Alan Morrison.

🖊️ JOURNALISM BOOMING: The COVID-19 recovery and shift to multi-channel media has led to a jobs boom for journalism. 112,400 work in the industry in the UK according to the latest ONS data with 11,000 open roles. Spotted Stephen Waddington.

🙅 MEDIA PLURALITY: An OFCOM paper called The Future of Media Plurality in the UK raises concerns about Google and Meta's influence over which online news sources and stories consumers see. It claims that this creates challenges for the sustainability of news publishers. Spotted Andy Barr.

Industry

🏗️ SOCIALLY MOBILE DEADLINE: Guild’s latest Build Better Business interview is with Sarah Waddington CBE who has set up Socially Mobile to help address social mobility in PR. Applications for funded places for the Spring 2022 cohort close on Friday, 3 December. Source Michelle Goodall.

📊 INDUSTRY DATA: The UK public relations industry employs 99,900 practitioners and is valued at £16.7bn according to the PRCA Census. However the positive data masks the sheer exhaustion among practitioners of operating at pace over the past two years. Source Stephen Waddington.

📏 PR MEASUREMENT CHAT: The PR Measurement Influencer Index uses Commetric’s proprietary influencer mapping methodology and human expertise to identify practitioners active in the Twitter discussion about PR analytics measurement. You might recognise a name or two. Spotted Jesper Anderson.

Research and insight

🤔 AI IN PR REPORT: A pathway must be developed to plot the options that practitioners can take to develop competency in the strategic and tactical uses and governance of AI and Big Data. This is one of five findings from the CIPR’s latest research on AI in public relations practice. Source Stephen Waddington.

😐 INFORMATION OVERLOAD: Our collective attention span is reducing according to a study published in Nature. Increasing amounts and types of content are competing for our attention leading to us becoming overwhelmed and switching off. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.

Social media and platforms

🗞️ GOOGLE GOES LOCAL: Google has released new search features to give greater visibility to local news content when searchers are looking for information about their communities. It has expanded a COVID-19 feature that adds a carousel of local news stories when relevant to a searcher’s query. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.

📈 BOLD TEXT SEO: Google’s John Mueller confirms that bolding important text in a paragraph can help SEO as it allows Google to understand the content better. The value of bolded text is relative to the rest of the content on the page. A few snippets throughout an article sends stronger signals. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.

🐤 TOP TWEETERS: A new study by Pew Research reports that a quarter of Twitter users produce 97% of all tweets. The research studied the activities of adult users of the social app in the US and showed once again the dominance of a few over many on social media. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.

Tools

📝 STYLE GUIDE: Maintaining a consistent voice is a challenge for any company, organisation, or individual writer. Writer operates like a grammar or spell checker and makes suggestions to text for a house style. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.