Notes from an Undefined Business
Welcome to the continuing beta. Bugs reports welcome.
Breaking news (literally)
Twitter limits you to 140 characters, so one of my posts today didn’t quite tell the whole picture:
Breaking news (literally): Announcement emails become spam by arriving well after friends on Twitter highlight the product's best features
That was inspired by an email I received from Pictory announcing their new issue. It arrived in my inbox at the exact time newsletter marketers said it should: around lunch, on a Wednesday. The perfect moment to grab my attention.
Except, I’d already heard about it from my friends who were pointing me directly to the features they liked in it. Their recommendation meant I went to look at Pictory an hour so before the publication asked me to.
Surprisingly, this was the first time I’d had an emotional connection to the intellectual question facing news organizations today: how do you be the source for breaking news when you audience’s friends have already told them the story?
Expect to see a lot more of my thoughts about this in the coming months. In the meantime, the company where I work has a few ideas — one of them is the still embryonic breakingnews.com. Take a look. Follow its feed. See what you think.