Seven years into their journey of building an insights suite for their newsroom, Politiken in Copenhagen continues to find learnings from giving their entire newsroom access to data. 

While they don’t advise throwing every piece of information at everyone, they firmly believe in not gatekeeping data from the entire newsroom. After evolving through several different dashboards, Politiken is currently using an asset of tools that keeps one or two key metrics at the center of everything. 

The insights dashboard is built in the same way as their Web site, an intentional move Digital Director Troels Behrendt Jørgensen says is easier to use than Google Analytics.

“We have no fear of sharing data. There’s nothing here for management eyes only. All of it is available for everyone who wants to dive in,” Jørgensen said.

It’s meant to be an easy way to get data about the daily work a journalist is doing. Politiken built an engagement bar that is seen at the bottom of every article. 

“It gives key insights as to how your specific article is performing right now,” Jørgensen said.

The team took seven different KPIs and put them into one mega KPI they call engagement. They’re weighted by importance. Things like reading time, number of conversions, and how many visitors hold more weight than secondary factors like pageviews. 

Scoring is meant to encourage journalists who can easily see where their article is performing well and enlighten them on where it is lacking. Each article is scored from 0-6.

“I hope that people find this a more constructive way of giving data input to your work than just maybe having a figure to look at,” Jørgensen said.

The hope is this format tells journalists more about how the audience perceived their article and how immersed they were in the product — and gives the newsroom tangible ways to work with the product to make it better.

The team also likes how this format makes it easy to talk about commercial and editorial goals, Jørgensen said.

“It’s a value-based KPI and it has reached I think broad acceptance in our newsroom,” he said. “People are generally happy with it. It has been accepted as the way we talk about performance.”

Politiken also built a product that calculates what they call immersion. It’s a green bar overlaid on the side of every story that shows how many readers are still around as they get deeper into an article. 

“It started a conversation of ‘are we writing too long’ or  maybe ‘are we writing too short.’ Can we do something with these elements like images or graphics,” Jørgensen said.

The data also showed the importance of identifying user needs and whether the stories they’re writing fill the needs. They ask reporters to tag every story they do under one of seven user needs. 

Nine months into this user needs journey, they have found audience perception of the content is different than the production of certain content, and the team currently is working on ways to change production to fill the gaps in user needs.

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