The Media Briefing

Client Spotlight

In early 2010, we started conversations with Rory Brown and Neil Thackray around launching a range of industry-specific news and analysis services built off idio’s platform. The first, TheMediaBriefing - the real-time news and information resource for the media industry, was launched in the summer of 2010, and has grown from strength to strength, attracting an engaged audience, building sponsorship revenue, running very successful industry events, and being nominated for industry awards. In its first 8 months, the system has categorized almost 80,000 articles around almost 30,000 entities. The model that TheMediaBriefing represents is one we have championed for a while, where intelligent curation technology is matched by deep editorial competency (in this amply represented by Patrick Smith).

Briefing Media from studio .fu on Vimeo.

The Platform

idio’s Platform was deployed to:

• aggregate, semantically analyse, and categorize content from a huge range of industry sources
• track all user interactions and analyse for preference data
• power on-site personalization for every user

The Product

We produced a website and mobile-optimized site, and powered segmented weekly email newsletters and Twitter accounts to broadcast the latest news in each industry sector. The main site contains a huge amount of aggregated and curated content from around the industry, structured and categorized for ease of use, and also highlights exclusive interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis articles from a large collective of expert commentators.

Once a user has registered, they are able to personalize the site very quickly, clicking to “follow” the topics, people, companies, and industry concepts that are most relevant to them.

All content is easily shareable across major social platforms and integrated with Facebook OpenGraph, and reader-submitted articles are encouraged.

The Process

We deployed idio’s platform to automatically aggregate and categorize the content, and employed idio’s Management Dashboard to allow control, editing and additional classification of the content as it flows through the system. As part of the project, we also designed and built a simple consumer interface (beta version) for content delivery.

The content comes from a huge range of sources, and is categorized firstly through semantic analysis, where multiple descriptors are added to every article. Then, each article is classified into an industry sector (TV, Radio, B2B Media etc) based on decision rules.

We delivered the project as a turnkey solution, including issue management, server hardware architecture, and system administration.

Benefits

Title page for Steve Jobs, Media Briefing

As the headline stats quoted above imply, the project has built a deep archive of structured content for The Media Briefing, which ranks very well for organic searches, and allows users to browse a relevant ‘story arc’ as they follow links to related topics. It also allows The Media Briefing to automatically publish “topic pages” on any trending news story, making it a go-to resource for industry professionals. As a result, The Media Briefing has made an almost immediate impact on the crowded media marketplace, earning a reputation for wide coverage and in-depth analysis.

In early 2011, The Media Briefing was nominated for the annual AOP Digital Publishing awards, under the categories of Independent Digital Publisher 2011, and Digital Editorial Individual 2011 (for Patrick Smith‘s contribution).