SODP Dispatch - 21 August 2025

A Publisher’s Engagement Playbook!

🚀 We’ve launched the first industry research report in partnership with Glide Publishing Platform!

Join global publishing leaders, product owners, data strategists, and tech innovators to benchmark how your team personalizes, engages, and grows using first-party data.

🔍️ What’s in it for you?

• Benchmark CDP Engagement, Adoption & Performance

• Discover Emerging Personalization Trends

• Access Actionable Best Practices

• Learn From Real-World Challenges & Wins

Whether you're using behavioural signals, AI-powered tools, or topic-based tagging, your insights matter. Help shape a report that reflects what’s really driving results across the industry.

👉️ Take the survey now! We need 300 respondents, and the survey closes very soon. Be the first to receive exclusive insights.

Hype and western values are shaping AI reporting in Africa: what needs to change

By Sisanda Nkoala, Musawenkosi Ndlovu, Tanja Bosch & Trust Matsilele

News media shape public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and influence how society interacts with these technologies. For many people, especially those who have not sought more knowledge about AI elsewhere, media platforms are a primary source of information.

This is particularly significant in Africa, where historical and socioeconomic contexts like colonial legacies and uneven technology transfer shape how AI is understood and adopted.

Consequently, the way African news media represent and frame AI carries weight in shaping broader public discourse.

To explore how African media report on AI, we, as media researchers, analysed 724 news articles about AI from 26 English-speaking African countries. These were published between 1 June 2022 and 31 December 2023. We looked at how these publications contributed to the hype about AI – exaggerated excitement, inflated expectations, and often sensationalised claims about what artificial intelligence can do.

Hype is often contrasted with the notion of something called an AI winter. This is a period of diminished interest and investment in AI technologies. It’s a cyclical trend that has been seen since AI’s inception in the 1950s. It manifests in exaggerated language, overly optimistic or pessimistic views and significant investments in AI.

Our study examined how AI was portrayed in African news media – whether it was exaggerated or overly optimistic. Media portrayal can influence policy, investment and public acceptance of new technologies. For example, in Germany it was found that positive media coverage of different fuels changed public perception in a positive way.

🔍 Edge of Search 2025

The 2025 edition of this in-person conference brings together leading search marketing professionals to share real-world strategies, future-focused SEO skills, and proven frameworks. You will learn how SEO really works, sharpen your search skills for what’s next, and boost the performance of your digital team with insights built for action. See more ▸

🧭Elements of Audience Engagement

Elements of Audience Engagement is a mindset, an introduction, and a toolkit. It is grounded in the belief that in a digital information ecosystem, prioritising audiences, their needs and habits, is journalism’s most resilient foundation for growth and impact, enabling newsrooms not just to survive but to adapt with purpose. See more ▸

By Vahe Arabian

✨ Seven evergreen tips for publishers

Creating evergreen content is a strategic imperative for every digital publisher. 

It's the type of content that continues to drive website traffic for years with minimal upkeep, offering ongoing value and relevance to your audience. However, the process of creating and leveraging evergreen content can be challenging.

Here are seven practical tips to help you master the art of evergreen content creation and maximize its potential:

1. Focus on evergreen formats: Start with proven evergreen content formats such as listicles, product reviews, ultimate guides, and how-to guides. These formats have a track record of delivering long-term value and remaining relevant over time.

2. Go in-depth: Dive deep into your chosen topic to provide comprehensive and valuable information to your audience. Invest time and effort in research, and aim to create content that addresses all aspects of the subject matter.

3. Use SEO best practices: Enhance the discoverability of your evergreen content by leveraging proven Google News SEO strategies. Conduct thorough keyword research, implement strategic internal linking, and cultivate a reputable backlink profile. Adhering to these tailored SEO practices will elevate your content's visibility and ranking, aligning it with the rigorous standards of news SEO.

4. Hack trends, avoid fads: While tracking trends can be beneficial, focus on creating content that transcends temporary fads. Instead, tackle broader topics that have long-term relevance and appeal to your target audience.

5. Use multimedia: Incorporate various forms of media, such as images, videos, and infographics, to create engaging and visually appealing content. Multimedia not only enhances user experience but also increases the likelihood of social sharing and engagement.

6. Remember to update: Regularly monitor and update your evergreen content to ensure its accuracy and relevance. Refreshing your content helps maintain its visibility in search results and keeps readers returning for more. As list-based articles are updated, they must continue to build authority and gain traction in the SERP.

7. Think of the audience: Consider your audience throughout the content creation process. Avoid overly technical language, format your content for readability, and strive to provide value to your readers. By catering to your audience's needs and preferences, you can increase engagement and build brand recognition.

Incorporating these tips into your content strategy can help you create high-value, evergreen content that drives sustainable traffic and revenue. Remember to promote your evergreen content across various channels, repurpose it into different formats, and consistently follow best practices to maximize its impact.

Agentic AI, brutal compression, upskilling, and the race to scale: What Westpac, Telstra, Suncorp and KPMG have learned about AI, and what's coming next | Mi3

Australia’s corporate giants are learning that artificial intelligence does not arrive politely, stage by stage, but crashes in like a compressed spring. What once passed for a five-year roadmap now comes with a two-year deadline. The armies of engineers who once busied themselves with plumbing and platforms are being told to redirect their efforts towards machine intelligence. And the instruction from the boardroom is unambiguous: AI is not a technology plan. It is the plan. That pattern repeats across boardrooms. Read more ▸

Want to win at local SEO? Focus on reviews and customer sentiment | Search Engine Land

Search is changing fast. This year, we’ve seen more instances of search engine results sharing space with AI-powered features that are changing how people find information. Along with the changes to how search engines display information, we’re also seeing users explore new methods to search for information. Google AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity – there are many large language models (LLMs) capturing users’ attention, providing new ways for users online to discover and make decisions about your brand. Read more ▸

Semantic Overlap vs. Density: Finding the Balance That Wins Retrieval | Duane Forrester Decodes

Marketers today spend their time on keyword research to uncover opportunities, closing content gaps, making sure pages are crawlable, and aligning content with EEAT principles. Those things still matter. But in a world where generative AI increasingly mediates information, they are not enough. The difference now is retrieval. It doesn’t matter how polished or authoritative your content looks to a human if the machine never pulls it into the answer set. Retrieval isn’t just about whether your page exists or whether it’s technically optimized. Read more ▸

Ahrefs Launches Tracker Comparing ChatGPT & Google Referral Traffic | SEJ

Ahrefs released a public dashboard that tracks how much referral traffic websites receive from Google Search versus ChatGPT, with monthly updates. The first dataset covers three complete months across 44,421 sites connected to Ahrefs’ free Web Analytics tool. For July, the dashboard reports Google at 41.9% of total web traffic across the cohort and ChatGPT at 0.19%. Month over month, Google grew 1.4% and ChatGPT grew 5.3%. The prior month showed the reverse pattern: Google +6.8% and ChatGPT +1.6%. Read more ▸

Social media still pushing suicide-related content to teens despite new UK safety laws | The Guardian

Social media platforms are still pushing depression, suicide and self-harm-related content to teenagers, despite new online safety laws intended to protect children. The Molly Rose Foundation opened dummy accounts posing as a 15-year-old girl, and then engaged with suicide, self-harm and depression posts. This prompted algorithms to bombard the account with “a tsunami of harmful content on Instagram Reels and TikTok’s For You page”, the charity’s analysis found. Read more ▸

Newspapers are rescued from closure in Wyoming and South Dakota as buyers swoop in | The Associated Press

A dozen recently shuttered newspapers across Wyoming and South Dakota are set to publish again, after buyers stepped up within days to prevent the rural communities from becoming “news deserts” where little or no local media remains. The swift rescues stand out in an industry where roughly two and a half newspapers disappear each week, according to a 2024 report from the Medill School of Journalism. The editor at one revived paper said his new owner saw ongoing profitability, while other outlets will be grabbed by publishers motivated by a sense of civic duty. Read more ▸