Tips for Moving the Needle: How Newsroom Managers Can Design a Sensible and Useful Metrics Policy Caitlin Petre Postdoctoral Associate and Knight Law and Media Fellow, Yale Law School Information Society Project Michael Keller Research Fellow, NewsLynx, Tow Center at Columbia / Al Jazeera America

Nowadays, metrics are in nearly every newsroom. But ubiquity isn’t the same as popularity: for many journalists, metrics seem confusing, overwhelming, distracting, or pointless. A thoughtful, tailored policy for using analytics in your newsroom can go a long way towards making sure metrics are actually useful and not insanity-inducing. Based on Petre’s extensive research on the use of metrics in newsrooms and Keller’s experience developing an impact-measuring tool, here are some tips for developing one: 1. Consider the potential impact of your metrics policy not only on content, but also on newsroom culture. Conversations about the ideal role of metrics in newsrooms often revolve around questions about predicted editorial effects – e.g., will looking at uniques help the newsroom to better serve its audience? Will looking at page views incentivize the production of clickbait? But it is just as important to think about the managerial effects of metrics. How are metrics likely to affect newsroom morale and employees’ relationships to their work and to each other? 2. It’s okay to have multiple “metrics that matter,” so long as expectations are clear. There is increasing pressure on newsroom managers to simplify the complex analytics landscape by choosing a single “metric that matters” for their newsrooms. But this isn’t always possible – or even desirable – in newsrooms that are trying to accomplish multiple goals at once (say, reaching a wide audience and holding public figures accountable). Rather than trying to shoehorn all your organizational goals into a single metric, newsrooms can evaluate performance on multiple measures – just make sure you’re clear with employees about what those measures are and exactly what is expected of them. 3. When setting traffic targets, focus on group goals – not individual ones. Metrics that rank individual writers against their coworkers are demoralizing and demotivating; they can also discourage the type of teamwork that is increasingly necessary in newsrooms trying to do more with less. If you’re setting traffic targets in your newsrooms, design collective goals that apply to particular sections, verticals, or other teams. 4. Don’t compensate writers based on traffic. Paying writers based on the number of clicks (or uniques, shares, minutes-on-page, etc.) that their articles attract may be tempting, but generally speaking it’s not a great idea. It causes employees considerable stress, discourages journalistic risk-taking, and can drown out other forms of performance evaluation. 5. Devote more newsroom resources to article-tagging. It may not be glamorous (okay, it’s definitely not), but developing and maintaining a detailed tagging system for your articles is well worth the effort. It will allow your newsroom to

capture data that will be highly valuable in assessing audience and impact over time. 6. When measuring impact, be willing to experiment with both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Tracking qualitative measures of impact, such as when an influencer mentions your story or whether it prompts a Congressional hearing, can be labor-intensive, but it’s highly worthwhile. (And, of course, tools like Newslynx are working to make it easier). Meanwhile, quantitative metrics are often vilified as encouraging the creation of clickbait, but they too can provide valuable insight into your newsroom’s impact. The bottom line: both qualitative and quantitative metrics are important to understanding the post-publication life of a story. 7. Choose your analytics tool with care…When choosing an analytics service for your newsroom, consider the business model and values of the vendor. Metrics dashboards often present themselves as authoritative and dispassionate reflections of the empirical world; it can be easy to forget that analytics companies have their own business imperatives. Newsroom managers should consider which analytics company’s values, branding strategy, and strategic objectives best align with their own goals. 8. …Or make your own! With the continuing maturation of open source analytics pipelines, it is now possible for news organizations to own their entire analytics stack and not have to rely on third party vendors for data. The next few years could see newsrooms access much more diverse offerings, providing faster analysis and greater detail, which is more relevant to journalism. That said, these pipelines are largely for data collection, so most newsrooms would need to design and implement their own custom interfaces to interpret this data for the average reporter and editor.

Petre-Keller ONA Tipsheet - GitHub

A thoughtful, tailored policy for using analytics in your newsroom can go a long way ... analysis and greater detail, which is more relevant to journalism. That said ...

97KB Sizes 0 Downloads 187 Views

Recommend Documents

Ones Dualitat ona corpuscle.pdf
m/s; h = 6,626·10–34 J·s; 1 eV = 1,60·10–19 J; 1 nm = 10–9 m. Resultat: 2,54·10-20 J. 3,32·1017 fotons. 22. (PAU juny 01) Calcula l'energia cinètica màxima ...

KEEFE - ONA 2015 - Bots Preso.pdf
Page 1 of 34. Build Bots to Boost Your Reporting. Honest Charley Bodkin, Los Angeles Times @charlex. Jenny Ye, WNYC @thepapaya. John Keefe, WNYC @jkeefe. Justin Myers, The Associated Press @myersjustinc. Philana Patterson, The Associated Press @phila

Leek Tipsheet (1).pdf
5HFLSHDGDSWHGIURP8UEDQ2UJDQLFV7RGD\1HZVOHWWHU9DQFRXYHU&DQDGD$SULO. 106. Page 2 of 2. Leek Tipsheet (1).pdf. Leek Tipsheet (1).

GitHub
domain = meq.domain(10,20,0,10); cells = meq.cells(domain,num_freq=200, num_time=100); ...... This is now contaminator-free. – Observe the ghosts. Optional ...

GitHub
data can only be “corrected” for a single point on the sky. ... sufficient to predict it at the phase center (shifting ... errors (well this is actually good news, isn't it?)

Torsten - GitHub
Metrum Research Group has developed a prototype Pharmacokinetic/Pharmacodynamic (PKPD) model library for use in Stan 2.12. ... Torsten uses a development version of Stan, that follows the 2.12 release, in order to implement the matrix exponential fun

Untitled - GitHub
The next section reviews some approaches adopted for this problem, in astronomy and in computer vision gener- ... cussed below), we would question the sensitivity of a. Delaunay triangulation alone for capturing the .... computation to be improved fr

ECf000172411 - GitHub
Robert. Spec Sr Trading Supt. ENA West Power Fundamental Analysis. Timothy A Heizenrader. 1400 Smith St, Houston, Tx. Yes. Yes. Arnold. John. VP Trading.

Untitled - GitHub
Iwip a man in the middle implementation. TOR. Andrea Marcelli prof. Fulvio Risso. 1859. Page 3. from packets. PEX. CethernetDipo topo data. Private. Execution. Environment to the awareness of a connection. FROG develpment. Cethernet DipD tcpD data. P

BOOM - GitHub
Dec 4, 2016 - 3.2.3 Managing the Global History Register . ..... Put another way, instructions don't need to spend N cycles moving their way through the fetch ...

Supervisor - GitHub
When given an integer, the supervisor terminates the child process using. Process.exit(child, :shutdown) and waits for an exist signal within the time.

robtarr - GitHub
http://globalmoxie.com/blog/making-of-people-mobile.shtml. Saturday, October ... http://24ways.org/2011/conditional-loading-for-responsive-designs. Saturday ...

MY9221 - GitHub
The MY9221, 12-channels (R/G/B x 4) c o n s t a n t current APDM (Adaptive Pulse Density. Modulation) LED driver, operates over a 3V ~ 5.5V input voltage ...

fpYlll - GitHub
Jul 6, 2017 - fpylll is a Python (2 and 3) library for performing lattice reduction on ... expressiveness and ease-of-use beat raw performance.1. 1Okay, to ... py.test for testing Python. .... GSO complete API for plain Gram-Schmidt objects, all.

article - GitHub
2 Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Caseros, Argentina. ..... www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/duc/guidelines/2002.html. 6. .... http://singhal.info/ieee2001.pdf.

PyBioMed - GitHub
calculate ten types of molecular descriptors to represent small molecules, including constitutional descriptors ... charge descriptors, molecular properties, kappa shape indices, MOE-type descriptors, and molecular ... The molecular weight (MW) is th

MOC3063 - GitHub
IF lies between max IFT (15mA for MOC3061M, 10mA for MOC3062M ..... Dual Cool™ ... Fairchild's Anti-Counterfeiting Policy is also stated on ourexternal website, ... Datasheet contains the design specifications for product development.

MLX90615 - GitHub
Nov 8, 2013 - of 0.02°C or via a 10-bit PWM (Pulse Width Modulated) signal from the device. ...... The chip supports a 2 wires serial protocol, build with pins SDA and SCL. ...... measure the temperature profile of the top of the can and keep the pe

Covarep - GitHub
Apr 23, 2014 - Gilles Degottex1, John Kane2, Thomas Drugman3, Tuomo Raitio4, Stefan .... Compile the Covarep.pdf document if Covarep.tex changed.

SeparableFilter11 - GitHub
1. SeparableFilter11. AMD Developer Relations. Overview ... Load the center sample(s) int2 i2KernelCenter ... Macro defines what happens at the kernel center.

Programming - GitHub
Jan 16, 2018 - The second you can only catch by thorough testing (see the HW). 5. Don't use magic numbers. 6. Use meaningful names. Don't do this: data("ChickWeight") out = lm(weight~Time+Chick+Diet, data=ChickWeight). 7. Comment things that aren't c