#EN – Oriol Salvador

How to design content around audience needs

Designing content around audience needs helps you build loyalty, boost engagement, and create stories that perform across platforms.

Designing content around audience needs is one of the most reliable ways to create stories that work across platforms, build loyalty and reach people who may not yet be familiar with your work.

This goes beyond questions about format or platform.

It asks content producers to understand what people are trying to accomplish when they open an article, watch a video or search for context on a topic that affects their lives.

When you identify those needs early, every editorial and production choice has a purpose and you gain a clearer sense of what the audience is looking for, what the story must deliver and how it should live across platforms.

The power of context in storytelling

Explainer videos, timelines and visual storytelling help audiences understand the complexity behind the information ecosystem today.

We are bombarded with notifications, social media snippets, and breaking headlines. The 24/7 news cycle can feel overwhelming.

Without context, news feels like noise, facts float in isolation, and stories lose meaning. Clear background and framing show audiences why events matter and how they connect to their lives.

It is what makes audiences understand, remember, and care.

2025 summarized by ChatGPT using words banned by Trump

ChatGPT recapped 2025 using words Trump tried to ban from U.S. government documents. Edited by a human with links to real news.

Visiting home for the holidays, fully jet lagged and unable to sleep, I couldn’t think of a better way to summarize 2025 than to ask ChatGPT to write a journalistic-looking article for me recapping the year.

The key? To add as many word as possible from a long list of so-called “woke” terms that U.S. President Donald J. Trump aimed to purge from U.S. federal government documents earlier this year.

@labyrinthlore
i’m fuming. #words
♬ original sound – Alexandria🤍

Credit to this video for originating the idea

Here is the result, with some human-made edits and links for context:

Bots ruin social media

As AI-generated content floods social media, preserving genuine human connections is essential for journalists, creators, and audiences.

Social media was meant to be a space for people to connect, share ideas, build communities, and participate in public life, a digital agora.

But what once brought us closer is now being overrun by automation.

Instead of amplifying real voices, algorithms are increasingly pushing artificial interaction.

AI translations for video reshape global understanding

Meta and YouTube use AI translations to accelerate content localization but risk losing emotion, cadence, and cultural context.

If you have been on social media lately consuming content originally produced in languages other than your own, you’re familiar with the push for dubbed audio, produced using artificial intelligence (AI). This is not a minor shift.

Meta and YouTube are doubling down on AI translation features that aim to increase reach and attract a broader audience.

And while their goal is similar, they have made design choices to implement this technology that produce very different outcomes.

Social media in 2025 was a mess

The short TikTok ban in the United States was the latest shakeup in the ever-evolving and exhausting social media landscape.

On Jan. 19 2025, TikTok was banned in the United States for a few hours.*

The latest resolution from the U.S. Supreme Court, issued on Jan. 17, made it “unlawful for companies in the United States to provide services to distribute, maintain or update the social media platform TikTok, unless U.S. operation of the platform is severed from Chinese control.”

The internet did what it does best, and many U.S.-based TikTok users protest the ban by moving to the app 小红书国际版 (“Xiaohongshu”), also known as REDnote. Ironically, this app is entirely Chinese-owned and operated from mainland China, unlike TikTok.

This digital migration sparkled both an unexpected cultural and language exchange and raised concerns about freedom of speech on the new platform.

If you struggled to keep track of everything happening, this TikTok ban is just the latest shakeup in the ever-evolving—and let’s face it, exhausting—social media landscape.

Where is the Christmas music in Spotify Wrapped?

Here’s what Spotify doesn’t count and why, plus a holiday playlist.

Since December 2016, the Swedish music streaming platform Spotify has been ending every year with an annual campaign-turned cultural moment known as Spotify Wrapped, a development from the Year in Music campaign in 2015.

The product is simple, and extremely effective: a personalized playlist of your most listened music, that comes with creative insights on your most played artists, genres, or what your music listening habits say about you.

And every year users fill social media feeds with the results.

You can even get roasted for your music taste.

How can AI assist writers working in a second or third language?

AI-powered tools like ChatGPT can significantly boost the writing confidence and skills of those working in a second or third language.

It has been about a year since my views on using AI as a journalist were transformed after a 3-day course at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Since then, I’ve integrated AI-powered virtual assistants like ChatGPT into various aspects of my personal and professional life, from revising and editing pieces of writing to assisting with my French learning or generating sets of keywords for tags on YouTube videos based on a given title and description.

One aspect of using ChatGPT that I don’t think is discussed enough is how much it can help as a writing assistant, particularly when working in languages that are not your mother tongue. In my experience, this is especially true for English (et un peu de français, aussi).

‘Add Yours’ sticker template to share events on Instagram

How to generate a virtual shared experience on Instagram Stories using this feature to enhance user engagement during an event.

Instagram’s “Add Yours” sticker template enables users to pin elements of an Instagram Story before publishing, allowing other users to share their own versions of it, including text, emojis, videos, or photos.

This sticker has become very popular on Stories feeds, with users sharing their favourite movies, personal traits and causes they support.

When working managing social media for a music event earlier this year, I started ruminating the idea of using this sticker, both for us and for active social media users (artists, delegates and regular festival-goers) that were going to use Instagram Stories to share their experience at the event.

The result was a success and the feedback was extremely positive.

Transforming the future of news

A sustainable future for news organizations depends on diversifying revenue, gaining trust back, and fostering agile methodologies.

Working in digital news feels a lot like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Constant changes and shifts raise a lot of strategic and operational questions regarding change management, workflows, tech…

The key is to understand change management is never fully done. Everything keeps changing all the time, it can’t be stopped. And humans are actually not naturally inclined to constant transformation and disruption. New challenges, like the popularization of generative artificial intelligence or an increasingly changing social media landscape, generate stress, discomfort and tons of uncertainty.

Those who are excited about riding the wave of change are actually the weirdos, not the norm, most people, and particularly the stakeholders in news organizations making the key decisions, usually belong to the norm, the old guard, who feels threatened and exhausted by change.

How do you get them on board? The modernization of a traditional work culture, in news and any other business, often only happens in a context of urgency, like after an acquisition or drastic layoffs.