Flickr photo courtesy of Ian StannardThe Friday Wrap is a review of news, posts, reports, and other items appearing in the last week that will help you stay on top of the forces shaping communication in this fast-paced, ever-changing environment. These are stories that may have been lost in the flood of headline news stories. I collect all of the items from which I choose the Wrap stories in my link blog, which you’re welcome to follow.

News

Flipboard launches private magazines for groups—Flipboard has launched “Private Group Magazines,” allowing individuals to curate content into the app’s attractive, flippable magazine format and make them visible only to members of a private group; only those invited to collaborate on the magazine will abe able to see it or contribute content to it. One possible use: work and project teams sharing information in an easily digestible format. Read more

Mobile and Wearables

Smartphones increasingly a source for news—The doubling of smartphone ownership in recent years has matched consumers’ growing reliance on the devices for access to news. According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of news consumers—66%—depend on their smartphones to occasionally follow breaking news events and remain current on news in which they’re interested; 33% do so “frequently.” Sixty-seven percent share pictures, videos, or commentary about events in their community; 35% do so frequently. Read more

New York Times to push news to Apple Watch—With a single sentence, The New York Times will deliver news to Apple Watches. The one-sentence stories will be written specifically for the small watch screen, covering business, politics, science, tech, and the arts. The stories will be accompanied by photography and short, bulleted summaries. Readers will be able to use Handoff to continue reading articles on their iPhones or iPads, or choose to “Save for Later,” adding an article to a personal reading list. Read more

2016 election updates courtesy of Periscope and Meerkat—If media coverage of the 2012 election drove you nuts, brace yourselves for “a never-ceasing stream of political events that anyone can broadcast or access with nothing but a smartphone.” While the non-step coverage—enabled in 2012 by Twitter—may have increased election noise, it also democratized the process, providing information previously unavailable to the public and giving journalists a new platform for delivering that content. There have already been live-streaming coverage by journalists via Meerkat and Periscope from early primary states Iowa and New Hampshire. Read more

Android version of Periscope coming soon—An update to the iOS version of Twitter’s live-streaming Periscope app displays broadcasts from people you follow more prominently than others. You can also now shut off follower notifications by default and choose not to share your location before broadcasting. The team confirmed an Android version is in the works. Read more

Facebook’s Riff lets you make videos with friends—Facebook unveiled yet another app called Riff that lets you create a video, add some tags, and then share it so your friends can watch it and then add their own clips to it, after which their friends can add clips, and so on. Videos have a maximum runtime of 20 seconds. The app is available for both iOS and Android. Read more

Voice calling comes to WhatsApp—The latest update to the Android version of WhatsApp lets users make voice calls using a cell phone data network. The feature is due in the iOS version in a few weeks. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. Read more

Generations use smartphones differently for watching video—Younger smartphone users watch a lot more video on their phones than older generations. A Pew Research Center found three-quarters of younger smartphone owners use their phones to watch videos at least weekly, compared with 46% of the 30-49 group and 31% of those 50 and older. Half of those in all age groups combined watch video on their phones at least once a week, compared to 97% for texting, 89% for web surfing, 88% for emailing, 75% for social networking, and 60% for shooting pictures or videos. Oh, and 92% actually use their phones for making phone calls. Read more

Research

Blogging declines among the Inc. 500—The Inc. 500 continues to tap into LinkedIn more than any other tool, according to the newest analysis of social media usage by the fastest growing companies. The annual study comes from Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D, a senior fellow of the Society for New Communication research and director of the Center for Marketing research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Meanwhile, blogging has declined for the first time in eight years, registering a drop of 6%. The Inc. 500 has also reduced its use of Facebook, with 4% fewer companies maintaining an active page; the total now stands at 80%. Only 7% of the group have a standalone social media policy, a decline of 6%, only 20% have a written social media plan, a drop of 9%, and 34% have an online crisis management strategy, a decline of 9%. Read more

Journalists want expert databases in online newsrooms—The number two feature journalists want in companies’ online newsrooms is a database of subject matter experts, according to the latest PRESSfeed report on the state of newsrooms. PR contacts tops the list and access to all brand content (not just press releases) ranked third. The study analyzed newsrooms and found few are optimized for search, a requirement more evident since the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer found search engines had become the most used and most trusted source for news and business information. Companies are doing somewhat better with visual content, though image and video galleries are prominent only among the Fortune 100. Read more

Tools and Resources

Banjo scans multiple services in search of location-specific trends—Monitoring social media is a standard activity with a wide range of tools available to help communicators figure out what people are talking about. None are quite like newcomer Banjo, which monitors billions of posts in real time across most key network, including international services like VKontakte in Russia and Weibo in China. Banjo employe image-processing technology to identify elements of photos, like smoke and fire, then combines what it learns with other posts and comments from the same location. The technology alerted users to a building explosion in Nw York nearly an hour before AP reported it. Read more

Twitter launches alternative to Storify—Curator is Twitter’s new media aggregation tool, combining tweets and Vines into an embeddable collection, much as Storify let syou combine content from throughout the Web into “stories” that can be embedded on other sites. Unlike Storify, Curator is only for qualified media companies. Using the tool, news organizations will be able to search for content and add it to a collection. Read more

Trends

Bad grammar is hurting your content marketing—For all the time marketers put into content, they’re evidently not putting enough time into ensuring the quality of that content is high. Sixty-nine percent of brands analyized in a study scored below a target score for grammar and style. The study cited a 2013 survey in which participants said they noticed bad spelling and grammar on company website, with nearly 60% claiming they wouldn’t use a company whose site featured bad grammar. Read more

More Worthwhile Reading

• How brands can harness the influence of Gen-narrators
• Buyers want more tech, retailers don’t want to offer it
• It’s hard to do research using data from Facebook
• Reddit AMAs are a terrible idea, yet companies keep on doing them