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For audience development, less is more
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April 29, 2013, 12:34 p.m.
LINK: www.theatlantic.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   April 29, 2013

At The Atlantic, Rob Meyer notes that the various pieces New York mediacentric microconglomerate Betaworks has assembled are starting to fit together:

Any link in any tweet from a news organization was probably shortened to something cute and custom — and the market leader there is Bit.ly, owned by Betaworks.

Even before that, the publication might use a tool to figure out when it should post stories on Twitter — a tool sold by a company like Social Flow, which is owned by Betaworks.

Littorally-proximate journalists will likely use a real-time analytics dashboard — like Chartbeat, a Betaworks product.

The leading social news aggregator of the moment is Digg, which — yes — Betaworks purchased and remade last summer.

And when someone saves a story for later, they’re likely to use the oldest product in that space, the product which has advertised on the Howard Stern Show and given itself away as Starbucks’s free app of the week: Instapaper.

Indeed, the only part of the cycle where Betaworks doesn’t now have a product is the reading stage, the Newsblurs and Flipboards of the world, where power consumers keep up with their blogs sans Twitter — but Betaworks plans to debut an RSS reader after Google shutters its Reader this summer.

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For audience development, less is more
“With a seemingly limitless number of platforms on which to meet and engage audiences — but still a finite number of hours in the day — teams will need to develop frameworks to understand where to start, stop, and pivot.”
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“We have to focus on the journalistic ‘last mile’ — not only producing reliable, independent information, but making sure that people actually receive it and can act on it.”
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