We talk a lot about data insights as part of INMA’s Newsroom Transformation Initiative. How are newsrooms using data in real-time and beyond? What are they learning? How does AI fit in?

My new report, Beyond the Dashboard: 14 Case Studies in Newsroom Metrics, goes deep into data usage at 14 leading global media brands. It’s all original research, made possible because these media organisations agreed to pull back the curtains to give us a look.

I hope you’ll download the report. I also wanted to share a few of my favourite findings and questions in this newsletter.

Would love to hear your thoughts: amalie.nash@inma.org. 

Amalie

P.S.: Want to hear INMA’s six initiative leads — myself included! — break down our thoughts on World Congress? Check out The Debrief, a post-World Congress podcast, available here.

How has data changed in the past year?

As part of my research for Beyond the Dashboard: 14 Case Studies in Newsroom Metrics, I asked media companies how their data analysis has changed in the past year. This question yielded some interesting responses.

Among those:

• The New York Times broadened and refined its engagement metrics, including more time-based measurement, and placed a greater focus on analysing multimedia, including video and audio.

• Mediahuis is now focused on subscriber attention time and no longer pays close attention to raw pageviews without any quality indication.

• The Times and The Sunday Times introduced a new engagement metric, called quality reads, which shows the percentage of readers that made it halfway through an article. Other companies also had similar takes on the importance of understanding reading time vs. article length. 

• Axel Springer shifted away from looking solely at volume metrics to focus on quality metrics like read-through rates, time on site (vs. expected time on site), and engagement rates with elements like videos, podcasts, or quizzes that are placed within an article.

• The Wall Street Journal substantially updated its metrics in the past year by introducing a full suite of metrics (subscriber interest, purposeful reach, and conversion rate). They also engineered these metrics to update in real-time. 

• Hearst is focusing more on engagement, engagement experiences, habit areas, and higher-converting areas.

• Bonnier News has narrowed its focus to be more specific in what they look at, including fewer KPIs.

• Rede Gazeta has pivoted away from total volume to adopt KPIs that are intentionally related to their strategic business and product objectives.

• Stuff works to identify trends to draw more robust conclusions instead of simply looking at data in isolation.

• Aftenposten used to pay more attention to conversion rates but now prioritises how content performs among subscribers. 

• Verdens Gang continues to adjust its goal-setting framework to align with business outcomes, notably focusing on young adults (ages 25-34) as a key target audience. 

• Politiken is looking more at AI insights because they think it needs to be explored.

• Jagran New Media has introduced diverse dashboards to analyse niche aspects of data, providing insights from overall performance down to individual author-level metrics.

Taken together, these responses point to a few key themes:

• Raw pageviews are no longer a key metric for many media companies. Instead, they’re focused on engagement — and not just time on site but more sophisticated measurements of how their audiences are responding to their content.

• Media organisations are smartly tying their analytics to their business outcomes. Interestingly, as digital subscription businesses become more mature, the focus is shifting from simply trying to gain conversions to how subscribers are engaging with the products.

• Analytics are not solely being used to analyse stories and are being used more intentionally on other forms of content, like videos and audio.

The report also includes where these media companies plan to go next with their data analysis, so read the full report, free to INMA members, for more.

How have your analytics changed in the past year? E-mail me: amalie.nash@inma.org.

How The Times and The Sunday Times and Aftenposten approach data

After the release of my latest report, Beyond the Dashboard: 14 Case Studies in Newsroom Metrics, we held a Webinar to delve into the key findings and hear from two of the companies featured in the report — The Times and The Sunday Times in London and Aftenposten in Norway.

It was a great opportunity to bring parts of the report to light; watch the full Webinar here. In the meantime, here’s a breakdown of what we learned:

The Times and The Sunday Times introduced its new in-house analytics tool, Times Editorial Dashboard (TED), one year ago. Janice Pereira, head of editorial data, said The Times had three systems prior to TED, and none were fully adopted by the newsroom.

“We had no shared language of what success looked like,” Pereira said. 

TED has allowed The Times to better identify and reduce low-traffic articles to give the staff more time to focus on content that resonates, Pereira said. A new quality reads metric provides a clear and transparent proxy for reader value.

Having TED as one single source of truth has been key: “We created a prototype and tested it with different groups to ensure it would be easy to use and addressed the pain points we had previously,” she said. “It was the bridge between data and editorial.”

One outcome of TED has been fewer but better stories, Pereira said, showing a chart of what happened when news and sports dug into the data.

The Times and The Sunday Times now is working on TED 2.0 with plans to reimagine its reporting suite. They’re also focused on better analysing real-time and evergreen content, Pereira said.

At Aftenposten in Norway, one single overarching goal was introduced two years ago — increasing daily engaged subscribers. This was done to eliminate having so many metrics, sometimes conflicting ones, said Kristin Kornberg, leader of insight and content development.

“It resonates really well with the journalists,” Kornberg said, noting it was not too hard to get newsroom adoption.

Kornberg said it was important every journalist understand how they contribute to that goal. All teams received targets for the number of stories the team should produce weekly that have more than 15,000 reads from subscribers. 

“When we publish many relevant and exclusive stories, we are reaching and engaging more readers, even on slow news days,” Kornberg said.

Only pageviews where readers consume more than 20% of the content count to avoid clickbait.

At the same time, Aftenposten focused on a target audience of people ages 30-55 who are well educated. That helped Aftenposten identify gender differences in how men and women consume stories, Kornberg said.

The results: The daily average of engaged users per month is up 20%, and digital subscriptions rose by 11%.

Next is working to ensure their journalism is even more relevant to readers, using language models to classify stories, Kornberg said. More to come on that as they learn.

Tell me about your data analysis: amalie.nash@inma.org.

Mark your calendars 

Upcoming INMA events that shouldn’t be missed:

• June 18: “How Village Media Has Aggressively Grown by Focusing on its Digital Playbook,” presented by Jeff Elgie, CEO of Village Media. Part of INMA’s Newsroom Transformation Initiative. Register now.

• July 7-10: South Asia News Media Festival, Mumbai. I’ll be at the festival, too, and would love to connect there. Register now.

About this newsletter

Today’s newsletter is written by Amalie Nash, based in Denver, Colorado, United States, and lead for the INMA Newsroom Transformation Initiative. Amalie will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of bringing newsrooms into the business of news.

This newsletter is a public face of the Newsroom Transformation Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Amalie at amalie.nash@inma.org or connect with her on INMA’s Slack channel with thoughts, suggestions, and questions.

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