IF YOU READ ONE THING
Are you asking the right questions? What happens when you bring together a handful of journalists to hash out how to ask more serious questions about complicated topics? The Solutions Journalism Network endeavored to find out and compiled the results in a new post on Medium. Its write-up includes specific pieces of advice, such as “amplify contradictions” and “ask questions that get to people’s motivations.” But perhaps more importantly, the article includes a list of good questions that probe deeper and can help writers concretely follow up on those pieces of advice.

POWERSTAT
One in four brands are unsure if social media ads are effective

How effective has paid social media advertising been for your business?



Source: State of Social Report, 2019

TREND WATCH
Groups are making a comeback Last year, journalist Casey Newton of The Verge made the bold prediction that “2019 is the return of the group chat”—and so far that looks to be the case. Users are rejecting the broadcast nature of social media and moving toward more intimate chat apps. Snapchat’s daily user count is bigger than Twitter’s. Facebook is planning to integrate Whatsapp, Instagram, and Messenger. Meanwhile, apps that focus on groups are getting more attention and investment, with publishers moving toward Facebook Groups and LinkedIn announcing more capabilities for its private group feature. 

NEWS YOU CAN USE
Be smart about audience development Axios, a news publication focused on brevity and breaking news, has very specific audiences—but the lessons of how it cultivated these audiences can be applied more broadly. In an interview with “The Idea,” Christine Roberts, the director of audience development at Axios, described how her team identified the publication’s key audiences, how these audiences connect to the site’s core focus, and which channels and platforms Axios will be focusing on and why. “We have to be pretty strategic about which new platforms we explore and different experiments that we run, but we really come back to the things that make Axios different,” Roberts told "The Idea.” “Smart brevity is a core tenant of Axios, and what it really means is delivering readers the news and why it matters in the most efficient way possible. So if we can find ways to do that … then we will pursue that opportunity.”

PERSPECTIVES
The return of chatbots? Today, bots may be more readily associated with havoc on social media, but just a few short years ago, bots were viewed more positively, as helpful benefactors of a hopeful technological future. However, the adoption of chatbots has been far from uniform. Now, with chat features and messengers becoming more prevalent—a quarter of the global population is expected to use messaging apps in 2019—organizations and bot makers are mulling over a potential return of those assistants:

• "Few expected that voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant would thrive and text-based chatbots would become a punchline. … Today's best algorithms are a long way from being able to really understand all the nuances of natural language." - Erin Griffith and Tom Simonite, Wired
• "Messenger apps and their integrated chatbots are showing up more and more in our web faces and places. … It’s much easier for the user or customer to do this quickly online. Brands get that." - Todd Clarke, Hootsuite
• "Chatbots can still prove transformative—if they're properly hooked up to that other buzzword, AI." - Alex Konrad, Forbes
• “[A] survey [of customers in the U.K.] found that 51 percent of consumers prefer for their questions to be answered by chatbots with AI while they are shopping online or using an app. And nearly a third (32 percent) say they would prefer a working chatbot powered by AI to a human customer service agent.” - Andrew Ross, Information Age

THIS WEEK IN OUR OFFICE
We learned how deeply passionate people can be about fries. There was a heated, days-long debate about the L.A. Times fast food french fry ranking. What’s your take?

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