As company president Justin Smith told Adweek , “We believe branded content is going to be an essential part of the site itself.”. Writing last week for the Nieman Journalism Lab , Ken Doctor analyzed “ The newsonomics of the Quartz business launch. ” It should be required reading for every B2B journalist and publisher. In identifying the key aspects and implications of the business news startup from Atlantic Media , Doctor touched on a number of key points for any business-oriented publication. Forbes and Atlantic Media may not have found the right model yet. MORE >>

His doubts were not, as some readers thought, about the benefits to non-publishing companies of treating content more journalistically. Rather, he was questioning whether most companies were really prepared to be more journalistic, to accept journalistic values. Is there really no place for journalistic values in most companies? These questions came to mind yesterday when I read about the one-year anniversary of the hiring of journalist Jesse Noyes by Eloqua, a marketing automation company. The goal of a company that hires a journalist is not to win a Pulitzer. MORE >>

Two of those companies, Narrative Science and Automated Insights , are developing programs that churn through computerized data about sports and other topics and spit out news stories. The fact that trade publisher Hanley Wood is one of the companies working with Narrative Science is, to me at least, encouraging. They are not going away. After a flurry of attention last year , we hadn’t heard too much in the interim about the robots that were going to displace humans as content creators. Then last month, Steve Lohr of the New York Times revived the issue. As James W. MORE >>

As Buttry says, the idea of a press release is that you can freely crib from it—the company that sent it to you will be perfectly happy if you do. MUD day 4: If you’re a B2B journalist or a journalistically inclined content marketer, you should be faithfully following Steve Buttry’s blog. Although he’s a died-in-the-wool newspaper guy, he deals frequently and insightfully with issues that also plague trade editors and reporters. good example is from Buttry’s post on Monday, in which he offers advice on attribution. The first is the thorny issue of press releases. MORE >>

Until recently, the only practical alternative for aspiring authors was vanity publishing: paying a company a large sum of money to produce their book, with little or no marketing or sales assistance. It won’t be long before self-publishing as a concept is dead. That’s not to say that the activity of publishing, whether it’s done by an individual, a small loose-knit group, or a corporation, is in decline. In fact, it’s healthier and growing faster than ever. These distinctions were once a reliable measure of quality. But the rise of self-publishing has complicated the equation. MORE >>