We think we know what best practices are when we see them or read them in often self-congratulatory notes on some triumph or other — a gain against metrics, an increase in subscriptions perhaps, or winning an award maybe.

The dirty secret behind best practices is that they can be quite personal or specific to the organisation you work in and not always applicable to other teams or publications. The point of the Newsroom Initiative is in part to dig out what might be shareable best practices.

With that in mind, I recently had an opportunity to share with News Corp Australia editors some thoughts on newsroom and journalistic ideas I thought might rate “best practice” ranking. It turned out to be quite a personal list based on what we have covered in the Newsroom Initiative since it was set up in February 2022 and a couple from my previous experiences.

It is necessarily subjective, and I suspect that were I asked to do it again in six months the examples might be different. I chose examples that I believe almost any news operation could apply, try, and learn from — mostly ones where measurement is clear so success isn’t just your gut feeling — and where we might also achieve the goal of better news products: journalism.

Here are two of them:

Quality Reads (QR) from The Financial Times

This is a very FT metric which the newsroom there uses without explicitly linking it to numbers of subscriptions or financial outcomes, but you can immediately see how it rather subtly can contribute to subscription business goals.

I reported on QR in an interview with then FT Digital Development Editor Renée Kaplan, who said: “The Quality Read is a composite metric and arises from the understanding that pageviews aren’t enough in a world in which advertising-driven revenue is radically diminished. We’re trying to judge whether a reader or subscriber is getting value from a piece of content ...”

All journalists want their work to be read and to satisfy the reader. To me a metric so simply derived from what motivates journalists but which also drives business goals is clever – particularly from a cultural point of view in a newsroom that is ruled by a journalistic sensibility.

The Quality Reads metric is: article length/average reading speed/time spent on the article.

Here’s how the FT’s Audience Engagement Editor Hannah Sarney described the Quality Read metric in an INMA Newsroom Initiative master class.

Simple. Culturally appropriate. It seems to work.

Personally, I believe newsrooms should generally be exposed more to hard numbers behind metrics and clearer goals linked to them, but I can see how this works well for the FT.

Verity from News Corp Australia

This wasn’t just to blow smoke at the News Australia editors. Verity has won INMA awards and was featured in Newsroom Initiative master classes for a reason. It seems to work both to give journalists across a wide range of publications data on what is being read, when, where, and by whom, and to give intelligent and actionable signals.

Like Quality Reads but with a detailed dashboard of data to analyse, Verity taps into the journalistic motivation to get your copy read and understood and maybe keep you in a job.

“If a journalist breaks an incredible story, but no one is there to read it, did they really break an incredible story,” was how Soraiya Fuda, head of audience development at News Corp Australia described the essential motivation of getting the data and the story right to match the audience. 

It’s a simple but super-effective formula that ties the work to the goals and the reader.

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