Data analysis in newsrooms has evolved from a time when we could only see metrics hours or a day past publication to being able to watch content performance in real-time to where we are today: using data insights to take immediate action and to predict future performance. 

We got into this subject during my recent Newsroom Transformation Initiative advisory council meeting.

Janis Kitzhofer, senior manager of editorial insights and development at Axel Springer in Germany, said they’re using an AI bot for homepage editors to make real-time decisions, for instance. Its brand Bild publishes around 400 stories a day, but only about 100 of those got homepage placement. 

“Which 100 is more or less a gut feeling from the editors, but we have 300 more that have a high potential for reaching a lot of people,” Kitzhofer said. “The bot will tell you this story has not been on the homepage, but from a data and AI evaluation side, it has a lot of potential. It has a lot of quality reads and monetisation opportunities.”

GerBen Van ’t Hek, group strategy newsroom director at Mediahuis Nederland, said they’ve also been adding recommendations into dashboards, such as promotional ideas.

He also noted they’re working to correlate attention time and story length to be able to give that data to journalists in real-time. For instance, if attention time is quite low compared to story length, the goal would be to revise the story immediately — whether that’s changing the headline or shortening the story.

“My dream is that you get a notification on your smartphone — there’s something wrong with your article or you’re doing well,” Van ’t Hek said.

Troels Jørgensen, digital director at Politiken in Denmark, said that’s where his newsroom also is aiming to go next with data insights. 

“Once we reach the level where we are able to reach the right journalist or the right manager or editor at the right moment with the right message from the right bot, we will have moved from hindsight through insight to foresight with our analysis and our analytical approach,” he said.

Jørgensen also touched on an important consideration in data analysis, which is: What are the questions we need to be asking ourselves?

“What are the questions we seek answers to that will help us succeed as a business? We used to ask each other questions like: How long was the reading time on this article or how many pageviews?” he said. “And then we moved into more difficult questions like: Did we succeed in retaining subscribers with this article?

“Now what we’re looking at is: What is the optimal timing and placement for this specific article? And what editorial and commercial performance can we anticipate from this article? So it’s foresight, really. And that takes time to develop. But it’s more of a mental practice than it’s a data practice.”

Want to learn more? My master class in October focuses on Beyond the dashboard: A deep dive into data analysis and insights. It features case studies from The New York Times, United States; McClatchy, United States; Rede Gazeta, Brazil; The Times and The Sunday Times, United Kingdom, Stuff, New Zealand; Aftenposten, Norway; The Wall Street Journal, United States; Hearst, United States; NTM, Sweden; Mediahuis, Belgium; and The Green Line, Canada.

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