Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The five W’s of journalism remain a cornerstone of newsgathering today, but I have been increasingly thinking about five C’s as well: Context, Conversation, Curation, Community and Collaboration.

Below I try to define each, with particular attention to how they intersect, and I link to one good piece of writing on the topic. Nothing about this is supposed to be comprehensive, nor is it particularly original, it’s just a list of the things I’m thinking about right now and an invitation for you to add your thoughts...

Let’s say you were to construct the ideal business publisher from scratch. It would have a strong tech platform that doesn’t slow down because of too many users or ads. It would foster direct connections. It would also have writers who were the most influential people in their industries. It would be digitally native. And it wouldn’t be overly reliant on ads.

Now look at LinkedIn. Back to the ideal business publisher. Now back to LinkedIn.

Over the last four months, LinkedIn, always living in the shadow of the sexier social platforms, has quietly built out a publishing platform. It is now a publisher in its own right, under former Fortune editor Dan Roth, with LinkedIn Today feeding aggregated articles from more than 1 million publications to LinkedIn’s 200 million users based on their preferences. It complemented that with an original publishing effort around “influencers,” recruiting a who’s who of business like Richard Branson, T. Boone Pickens and Ari Emanuel, and about 250 others....

David Carr’s weekly column for The New York Times carries an intriguing title: “The Media Equation.” With 430,000 Twitter followers, he’s a unique journalist exploring the world of media for the larger Times brand, with its 9.5 million followers. It’s similar to the 1,200 individually branded FORBES contributors — and staff reporters, too — who now write about specific business topics under our 96-year-old umbrella brand.  

I love the rubric attached to David’s newspaper work. FORBES itself is trying to figure out the media equation in an era when anyone can publish anytime — no trucks, planes or satellites required. Our still-evolving solution disrupts century-old newsroom thinking and processes. It also breaks with tradition in how certain marketing messages are sold and integrated on our growing news platform....