Analytics in newsrooms
How do we know we’re doing good at our job? For newspapers, the answer lies in circulation size, share of the advertising pie, journalism awards, and influence over audiences.
But with circulation and advertising going down industry-wide and digital technology creating a huge impact on the print business, measurements of success are changing.
Newsrooms are learning to use analytics to measure effectiveness of articles, reach, engagement with audiences and, generally, to know if we’re doing well or succeeding in the business in this digital age.
Analytics, according to Techopedia.com, is the scientific process of discovering and communicating the meaningful patterns which can be found in data. It is concerned with turning raw data into insight for making better decisions. To a non-techie, analytics are tools to know how many people read your articles, what stories interest them, what time of the day they read you, what questions to pursue, and many more. A newsroom even crudely using analytics could learn a lot about its audience to guide it in its digital transformation from being print-centric.
What are the new ways to tell if a newspaper is doing good? Newspapers have websites and their analytics include the number of users or visits, which measure the popularity of the website, page views to gauge the relevance of the articles, and traffic source to show how people reach you, whether through a search engine or social media like Facebook or if they are loyal readers who go direct to the website.
Learning how the reader journeys across the website will tell newsrooms if the design or layout is attractive, sexy enough to entice people to read on, and if the selection of articles – which story goes to the headline and what detail to highlight - is consistent with what the reader may find as interesting or necessary.
Popular tools are Google Analytics, Alexa, Heatmap, Facebook Insights and many more. Marketing offices also find these tools useful to measure effectiveness of the message and what medium to use for which part of the market.
For newsrooms, these new metrics help editors decide on tomorrow’s headline, what stories to pursue, how to remain relevant to the readers, and what strategy to adopt on print and digital.
Editorial decision-making just became more exciting.
Masses for the feast of the Our Lady of Peňafrancia, patroness of Bicol, are being held every day until next Sunday at the Archdiocesan Shrine of St. Therese of the Child Jesus in Lahug, Cebu City.
The masses, held every 5:30 p.m., started last Friday and will continue to Sept. 22, to be followed the next day, Sept. 23, a Sunday, with the fiesta mass to be celebrated by Bicolano priests.
The Bicol Association of Cebu Inc. is organizing fiesta activities. All devotees to the Ina or the Our Lady of Peňafrancia are invited to attend the fiesta masses.