This week’s INMA Webinar took a detour from its typical format to give media companies a stripped down, raw, and real conversation about data and newsrooms. 

Everyone has their own feelings about what metrics are the most important. And there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to collecting and analysing data. What’s most important is that media companies continuously tweak how they interact with data and learn which metrics tell them the most about how their business is operating: good, bad, and otherwise.

A key takeaway: Newsrooms can measure all kinds of data points but need to zero in on ones that can lead to actionable insights — and present the data in easy-to-understand dashboards and reports.

There are learnings, pitfalls, successes, and themes that give media companies a good starting point to interacting with data, which is what INMA’s Newsroom Transformation Initiative Lead Amalie Nash hoped to surface during the Webinar as she brought together several media leaders to discuss how they’re making data work for them. 

The topic stemmed from feedback Nash has received recently from newsroom leaders asking about the role data needs to be playing in their newsrooms and the culture behind it. Nash showed recommendations of top KPIs for organisations based on subscription-led news organisations and audience-led newsrooms.

The leading data points subscription-led newsrooms are looking at are:

• Total subscriber count.

• Active subscriber count.

• Average revenue per user (the more companies discount, the more ARPU goes down).

• Content conversion (how the content being produced is converting).

• Paywall stop rate/visibility rate.

“You need to understand that of that total subscriber base, how many people are visiting you during a specific period that you’re looking at — whether that’s weekly or monthly — to understand how many people within that are likely to churn because they’re not very active on your site,” Nash said.

The leading data points for audience-led newsrooms are:

• Pageviews.

• Traffic by source (where people are coming from, can cultivate and help understand loyalty).

• Visit depth (how much people are viewing on the site).

• Return frequency.

• Direct traffic (owning the audience, fighting against algorithm changes).

• RPM by source (what’s the value of a pageview, impacts to content strategy).

Hearst Newsapers focuses on frequency, social

Hearst Newspaper is building new tools that encourage the newsroom to check in daily with real-time data, explained Alex Ptachick, senior director of new content initiatives.

They use Parse.ly and have dedicated team members who look at different dashboards, as well as Google Analytics. One of their dashboards considers how “far to goal” the business is over the course of the month. Hearst also has a team focused on newsletters, social, search, and even podcasts.

“That group of folks is starting to build out monthly reports so we’re really keeping a pulse on it,” Ptachick said. “If anything goes wacky, we’re able to identify it pretty quickly and make some adjustments.”

Hearst is also paying more attention to return frequency than they ever have.

“We have a really tight paywall across most of our sites. So if they are coming back every month and running through their metre, maybe they are folks we need to target a little bit harder to go ahead and convert,” Ptachick said.

They also lean on their director of content analytics, Kerri Vila, to help them cut through the noise of all this data. Vila sends out a consolidated report weekly with actionable insights in it. 

“It’s not just, ‘Here’s the data, interpret it, and figure out what to do,’” Ptachick said. “She actually takes that step of, ‘Here are some takeaways and here are some actionable insights.’”

Hearst has a big focus on Instagram as well. They see publishers treating Instagram as a CMS of sorts. The media company is particularly interested in the search traffic on Instagram as younger generations often go to these platforms to use it as their Google. 

Hearst concentrates on storytelling in their social feeds as well as impressions and engagement, looking closely at saves, shares, and comments, Ptachick said. To help break into a fast-paced scrolling environment, Hearst produces more short-form videos and photo galleries, as well as ‘“links in bio” to get users back to their sites where they will hopefully hit the paywall and convert. 

Politiken prioritises data accessibility 

At Politiken in Denmark, Digital Director Troels Jørgensen and team are set on making data visible and accessible for all journalists.

The easiest way they found to do this was to integrate the data and dashboards into their Web site itself. Any newsroom member can click on any story and see a green bar at the bottom of the screen. This houses the main data connected to the article.

“You can dive into the reading depth if you look at the green bar in the left hand corner, Jørgensen said. “You can look at how far into the article readers came.”

As a result, Politiken can adjust how long stories are. They even came up with different templates for journalists to publish within small, medium, large, XL, and XXL formats. 

Their dashboard also shows how well each story length is performing while the data shares how long articles should be. The format is something the team discusses before it’s written.

“Like any good buffet, you have to have some parts of everything. Your Web site can’t only consist of long stories. You have to have a buffet of all the stories of all the lengths you produce.”

Politiken created engagement parameters, which assign a label to the article based on how engaging it is. It also shows the amount of pageviews, average reading time, how many people looked at the prices in the shop, and how many people bought a subscription after reading that specific article. 

“We have our own engagement KPI on every article with seven different data points,” Jørgensen said.

This includes things like page impressions and the number of people who bought a subscription from that article. The metrics are weighted differently. For instance, they believe “subscriptions bought” holds more weight than impressions.

“We don’t want to be the people with the big PDF coming out every Sunday on ‘here’s what you need to understand about our traffic,’” Jorgensen said. “You can dive into it yourself and see how your stories behave on the Web site.”

NTM tracks subscriber pageviews as its primary KPI

At NTM in Sweden, Head of Editorial Development Jens Pettersson is charged with making data accessible to newsrooms. NTM has integrated data and dashboards into their CMS like Politiken. After undergoing a major overhaul, they have the exact same dashboards for everyone on the team.

Their CMS dashboard, named 360, is built in-house by NTM. Team members can select a reporter and a timeframe and see how many articles that person published, the length of those articles, conversions of subscribers, pageviews, time spent, and gender denominations. They have a goal of 50/50 gender representation, acknowleging they need to attract more women.

“We try to track subscriber pageviews as the main KPI because that gives us a very simple measure if something is good or not,” Pettersson said.

Their goal is to steer journalists to talk to the 30- to 50-year-old audience they’re going after. To do this, they created what they call “star articles.”

“That is measuring click-through rate on the articles, and if they get a CTR above 50%, they will be marked with a star,” Pettersson said.

Their dashboard shows how many star articles each reporter has written and the metrics of how well it performed, including why and how it got its star. 

“It’s a very simple way of talking about data,” Pettersson said. “You have a symbol, you have something that is positive, stars are good, and that’s easy for them to count how many stars they’ve gotten this week.”

Their live dashboard is crucial for their editors. They can look at all their Web sites at the same time or one at a time and find their most-read articles, how many subscribers are on the site at a given moment, as well as the gender and age of those subscribers.

“The combination of having easy access to data and a situation where you need to sit down and go in-depth with your editor has been very good for us,” Pettersson said.

Daily Mail’s e-paper dashboard shares user data with newsroom

At the Daily Mail in the UK, Product Director Simon Regan-Edwards showed INMA members a dashboard that is specific to the e-paper. It highlights articles with the highest reading time, the number of readers that day, where that number falls over a certain period of time, and what kind of reader is there. 

Is it someone who is a scanner, a regular, or long reader? They can also see if the readers are core readers, categorised as people who visit more than three days per week, or occasional readers.

The data from their dashboard showed 80% of their e-paper readers are on a tablet. Prior to this, they assumed it was mostly mobile.

“I think what’s interesting to bring to the newsroom is to show what kind of not only stories people are reading but actually the kind of users we got and what kind of platforms they read on,” Regan-Edwards said.

Europower focuses newsroom on one target

Data is proving its value at a seven-person newsroom in Norway. Ole Petter Pedersen, publisher at Europower, joined the media company to grow it. One of the first changes he made was to have one target for everyone in the newsroom.

“As soon as you have many different targets, people tend to stick to the one they prefer and the one that’s easiest to reach,” Petter Pedersen said.

They set their target to have 3,500 weekly active subscribers by 2024, roughly 150% growth. To narrow down all the data they have access to, they decided active subscriber engagement was the key data point for the core business.

“It’s not much use to us if it’s not read by subscribers,” Petter Pedersen said. 

They used data to determine which stories subscribers weren’t reading and discussed it with the newsroom. They then phased out or rewrote those stories. They cut their number of stories in half and nearly tripled subscriber readership. 

“And we reached our target a year and four weeks ahead of schedule, so now, of course, we are looking at another target,” Petter Pedersen said. “We learned if we can activate subscribers on a weekly basis, it’s a good foundation for further engagement.”

Amedia learns lesson about data and journalists

At Amedia, also in Norway, Markus Rask Jensen and team needed a way to track data among its 100 local newspapers.

“The idea of simplicity and visualising data in a universal way that everyone can connect to their daily jobs is what we had most interest in doing,” Rask Jensen, director of content development, said.

They call their dashboard the “heartbeat report.” It gives a live overview of the front page of the newspaper and shows how many active subscribers are on the site compared to the last four-week average. 

“The number of visiting subscribers is one of the metrics that correlates most directly with engagement, with churn, and with loyalty,” Rask Jensen said.

Amedia also uses stars to show an article was read three times what they consider to be an average number of reads. 

Having insights that are actionable has proven to be the most valuable thing in their data journey. How many subscribers read an article is an easy metric to transfer to a journalist’s work every day. If they get more readers to read their articles, the company as a whole will do better. 

The engagement metric they used was “how many subscribers spent two minutes or more on a Web page.” They saw this as relating to loyalty and the will to keep subscribing. 

“The problem was that every journalist translated that into their own work and started writing articles with the aim of having an average reading time of more than two minutes,” Rask Jensen said.

They ended up writing fewer articles, longer articles, and sometimes poorer articles. So when embarking on or tweaking a data journey, he warns media companies to be careful of their targets and how they can be interpreted. 

INMA members can watch the recording of this or any other past INMA Webinar here.

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