Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

News content optimizes differently, depending on platform. At the Missouri School of Journalism, students are testing new strategies to optimize platform-specific content with a goal of creating sequential usage patterns that can be measured and monetized.

...Our hypothesis? Different content optimizes to different platforms at different points in a progressive storytelling process. For instance, slideshows, “Five Things to Know,” and other short, easy-to-consume elements resonate on mobile phones. But because mobile has varying screen sizes and optimization opportunities, video clips and data visualization might resonate better on a tablet. The web becomes a placeholder for content early in the process, and then a repository or library for the sum of a day’s work or a story’s life cycle. And then there is the core product, “the show” or the paper or the newscast. Less and less likely to be the place where news is broken, it’s where depth is provided and value added. This is to say nothing of the role of social media and of how content is parsed in platform-specific and exclusive ways....