Media Insider: PR Lessons From Time Magazine, Tips for Surviving “Twitter Rage” and More Media Moves

Welcome to Media Insider, PR Newswire’s round up of journalism, blogging and freelancing stories from the week.

Photo by Johan Larsson used under CC BY 2.0

Push it: How The Wall Street Journal Plans to Make its Push Alerts More Personal (Nieman Journalism Lab)

The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Mobile Editor David Ho explains the evolution of push notifications and plans for increased personalization. Ho assesses that “the biggest challenge for news organizations is relevance.” In order to not burden digital readers with an overabundance of irrelevant stories, there should be an increased use of “customized and personalized alerts” determined by editorial decisions, enhanced technology and “really good algorithms.” With the increase in mobile application use, especially to receive news, push notifications will become even more popular. Here is some valuable information on how a national outlet is setting a precedent for how to use them.

How Time Magazine Turned Bad PR Around After Wacky VR Cover (PBS MediaShift)

By now many of us have probably seen the hilariously uncomfortable Time Magazine ‘Virtual Reality’ cover for August, which went viral and inspired a trove of memes and articles soon after its release. Molly Phillips, the author of this piece, demonstrates how Time Magazine used this coverage to their advantage by sharing some of their favorite memes inspired by the goofy cover. As Phillips points out, “By showing they got the humor the rest of the world was seeing in the cover, they in fact may have saved themselves from a crisis.”

NBCUniversal Buys Big Chunks of Vox Media and BuzzFeed (Re/code)

This week NBCUniversal and Vox Media announced a “strategic partnership.” The media giant is investing $200 million in Vox Media, now making the latter worth more than $1 billion. What this means, among other things, is that they will collaborate on digital advertising, work together on video advertising and video programming, and that you will likely see Vox Media employees more frequently on NBCU-owned networks. NBCU is also expected to announce more information involving the BuzzFeed deal this week.

Journalists Offer Tips on Enduring – and Learning From – Storms of Twitter Rage (Poynter)

This piece offers some great tips for journalists on how to deal with “Twitter rage”. As the author points out “Sooner or later […] most journalists write something that makes somebody very, very angry.” While years ago that may have resulted in a letter to the editor or some phone calls, today people use social media to vent their frustrations, especially through tweeting. Here, Benjamin Mullin interviews a few journalists who have dealt with online vitriol and, in turn, offers some great advice that includes befriending the mute button, biting ones tongue and caring about criticisms “as little as possible.”

Media Moves and News for the Week of August 10 (PR Newswire’s Media Moves)

Media Moves keeps you up to date with who went where in the world of media. This week MSNBC shifts its programming, two reporters join Politico and Forbes promotes a contributing writer to senior editor.

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Stephanie de Ruiter is an audience researcher with PR Newswire keeping up with media moves throughout the nation with a focus on blogs and online publications.