🔶 News Alchemists #41: "A system for mapping, curating, and distributing civic information at scale."

Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!

I don't know how other people manage their newsletter's operations, but I have a file in Google Sheets with seventeen different tabs:

In one tab I keep track of the newsletters I send;

In another one I save links that might be interesting to share with you in upcoming editions;

Then there's the one where I track the analytics of the newsletter (my guilty pleasure is spending an awful lot of unproductive time staring at bar charts, line charts, and scatter plots, wondering how to make them prettier – that degree in Statistics I got fifteen years ago might have had a deeper impact on me than I thought...);

The one where I keep track of the interactions I have with readers inside and outside the inbox; and so on.

Last week I noticed that the 'Links' tab was A) overflowing and a complete mess, B) full of great links I've saved in the last few months and then totally forgot about because every week there are new interesting links that catch my attention.

So today I'm making amends to those forgotten links by picking some of the best ones that shouldn't go un-shared any longer. Consider it a sort of ICYMI edition.

By the way, tomorrow is my birthday! 🎂 Do you want to help me celebrate? 🎁 Forward this newsletter to a colleague and tell them to sign up. The chart in the 'Members' tab is going to look so good after they join us.

Enjoy the links, and see you next week 📚

1. How the French financial newspaper Les Echos boosted account creations with a new “app hour” feature 👉 LINK

'Curation is the new creation' I like to say (with a tad of self-interest since curation is what I do too). That's what they must have thought at 🧩 Les Echos earlier this year, when they decided to launch a new app feature called “18-20”, a reference to the time between 6pm and 8pm, which usually sees higher traffic than other times of the day as people get off work. No content is created specifically for 18-20: fifteen articles are selected among the 130 that Les Echos publishes daily, and repackaged in a fresher and visually more appealing way to reach younger audiences – with no ads and no access limit, at least at the start. The early results are very encouraging.

(I was very disappointed to learn that 18-20 is available all day and not just between 6pm and 8pm like the social media only open for three hours a day that I shared in #25.)

2. In an age where AI assistants can instantly respond to virtually any query, what's journalism's unique value proposition? 👉 LINK

Important question by 🧞Ezra Eeman on LinkedIn – great answers in the comments.

3. How The Guardian US meets underrepresented communities where they are 👉 LINK

🧞Ava M. Macha has a fantastic job title: audience engagement editor for underrepresented communities. The job includes regular audience editor tasks, but also building relationships with diverse audiences, both through pre-publication listening and post-publication amplification.

“I’m not just here to publish tweets. I’m here to ask: 'Who should we be speaking with? Who needs to see themselves in this story? And how do we build those relationships early, and ethically?'”

4. The state of product management in journalism: 2025 census 👉 LINK

Without a product mindset, audience-centricity can only go so far: "Product is the discipline in the newsroom most focused on creating value. It is designed to navigate audience shifts and technological disruption at the speed the next decade demands, aligning audience needs with editorial priorities, business strategy, and technology, while ensuring journalism delivers on its public service mission."

If you missed it when it was published a couple of months ago, take a few minutes to check out the findings of the News Product Alliance's 2025 census, written by 🧞Becca Aaronson and 🧞Feli Carrique (one of the members of the original News Alchemists crew).

(Disclaimer: my partner works at the NPA but I promise she has not asked me to share this. She also happens to be the informal editor of this newsletter: it's only thanks to her that my emails reach your inbox without typos, words made up by my brain that don't actually exist in English, and sentences so convoluted that even LLMs would refuse to read them.)

5. Ringier digital media playbook 👉 LINK

"A collection of best practice guides to clarify our digital publishing expectations and align priorities across the organization. It's a valuable resource for all digital product stakeholders, including senior leadership and department heads. Now made public, it is available for other media organizations to use."

A useful playbook by 🧩 Ringier, a Swiss media company that operates titles and brands in 19 European and African countries.

6. A system for mapping, curating, and distributing civic information at scale. 👉 LINK

Earlier this year, 🧩 The Jersey Bee (already featured in #3 and #14) filed a patent for 'Harvest', a system that collects information from dozens of different online sources (Facebook pages, school websites, etc.) and, with a clever use of automation, produces thousands of news briefs and daily newsletters that help people follow what's happening in their community.

7. Our notion of trust is telling – about journalism itself 👉 LINK

Trust is a frequent topic of this newsletter. A quick search tells me that the word 'trust' appears in almost 10% of titles and/or descriptions of the links I shared. This reflection on trust by 🧞Sophie van Oostvoorn will bring the percentage up a little bit further:

“We are in the business of trust,” I read on Monday morning in a LinkedIn post by a media executive. I nearly choked on my freshly made cappuccino. The business of trust — as if trust is something you can package and sell: “Sign up for six months and get access to our puzzle app plus a complimentary box of trust!”

(My editor and I just spent twenty minutes debating whether in this last description the correct tense should be "the links I shared" or "the links I've shared". Claude says they are both acceptable, but Claude is a people-pleaser and can't be trusted. What do you say?)

Seven links are not enough? How about 200+?