De kracht van tijdelijke podcasts en nieuwsbrieven

The first problem is that there is no single algorithm that guides the way Twitter decides to elevate or bury content, unlike what Musk has implied in the past. Rather, according to sources within Twitter’s technical team who spoke on condition of anonymity, decisions are the result of many different algorithms that perform a complex dance atop mountains of data and a multitude of human actions. Results are also tailored to each user based on their personal information and behavior. “There is no ‘master algorithm’ for Twitter,” one company source says.

Another issue is that Twitter uses machine learning to guide many decisions. For instance, Twitter trains numerous machine learning models to help decide which posts to prioritize on users’ feeds based on a dizzying number of factors. These models cannot be inspected like regular code; they need to be tested in an environment that replicates the real world as closely as possible. The models also change rapidly in the real system, in response to a constant flow of new data, user behavior, and input from moderators. This would quickly make them an unreliable source of information.

The launch of CNN+ was a solution—having a streaming app—looking for a problem. Did users want this? No one knew or cared; they just wanted to have a streaming app because that’s what all media companies wanted to have. It was the height of “DTC Media,” which meant everyone needed to bypass the middleman and go direct to the user.

The problem is that this is leading with a business model rather than leading with what the audience actually wants. Its audience is old as heck. My guess is CNN’s core demographic all still have their cable subscriptions, so why did it need a streaming product? To make matters worse, CNN+ wasn’t going to include the main CNN product (you know, live news) because its contracts with cable providers prevented it from going direct to consumers.

A great live blog should feel like you’re being guided through a story by an expert as it happens. A bad one feels like a barrage of barely connected developments being thrown at you relentlessly. That sense of shepherding people through an event is at the heart of all our best work and the things you mention above are tools to be deployed in that effort when they’re most relevant and essential.

The first fruits of this approach involve giving our live bloggers the ability to pin the most significant recent event to the top of the chronological feed and also to allow readers to flip a switch to filter the blog to only the most important events, as defined by the journalists working on it. These are just the first steps to try to widen the appeal of the live blogs and help readers understand where they are in a rapidly developing situation. 

Our digital editors now have a far more flexible set of tools for defining the layout of our home pages. That doesn’t sound exciting or radical in the abstract. But in the current moment the impact is evident in the way that we can show more detail from the live blog at the top of our site and build containers quickly and easily that provide supporting context by foregrounding our explainers.