The most recent INMA report, Beyond the Dashboard: 14 Case Studies in Newsroom Metrics, took a deep dive into how 14 newsrooms around the world are evolving.

During last week’s Webinar, report author Amalie Nash, lead of the INMA Newsroom Transformation Initiative, shared key findings from that report before introducing presentations from the two of the newsrooms involved in the report.

“One of the first key findings that I thought was really interesting was this idea that people really aren’t talking a whole lot about pageviews anymore,” Nash said, adding some organisations have stopped displaying them altogether, recognising they don’t reflect meaningful audience engagement. Instead, the emphasis has shifted to metrics that measure audience loyalty and behaviour — such as return visits, time spent on page, and conversion rates.

“In a world where we’ve been talking a lot about direct traffic and how to build more direct traffic, the overall size of your audience doesn't matter as much as how do you get people back,” she said.

Another key takeaway is the focus on quality reads and reading time. Newsrooms are paying closer attention to whether people are actually reading stories — and for how long — rather than simply clicking into them. If a headline draws many views but users bounce quickly, it’s a red flag that the content didn’t meet expectations. Metrics are being used to improve story quality and reader trust.

Changing metrics

The report discovered a trend toward simplifying analytics, and dashboards have been streamlined to highlight only the most critical KPIs — usually just one or two that are aligned with each team’s role: “It’s just too much if we’re showing them too much data,” Nash observed.

Before the pandemic, she said it was common to have dashboards that showed every measurable analytic imaginable — and newsrooms weren’t sure what to do with them. The question companies are trying to answer today is how to refine the data so journalists and editors know what to do with it to help them do their jobs better.

There is also a rising interest in measuring the impact of journalism, not just its reach. Some newsrooms now track the diversity of sources and representation in stories, acknowledging that readers want to see themselves reflected in coverage. Gender balance, source variety, and topic diversity are becoming new markers of success.

“We’re paying closer attention to those sorts of metrics as well and in some cases, building that into the tools that we use to measure.”

Of course, AI and automation are part of any conversation around newsrooms today, and Nash found newsrooms are interested — but cautious.

“A lot of companies are using AI, but they don’t trust it yet enough to hand over their data analysis, too,” Nash said. As AI continues to evolve, newsrooms will continue to look at how to utilise it and stay ahead of the curve.

Finally, the cultural shift around data is striking.

“What it comes down to is essentially I think that there’s a real evolution in the use of data and it’s been very strong,” Nash said.  Data is now an integral part of daily newsroom conversations and has become the starting point for critical thinking and informed decision-making.

“I think newsrooms have really started to embrace data in new ways,” Nash said. “It’s really about understanding our audience, delivering the kind of content, being relevant to people, and talking about our value to our readers, to our communities.”

Bringing data to life 

Janice Pereira, head of editorial data at The Times and The Sunday Times in the U.K. shared the company’s journey with newsroom data. In May 2023, it launched TED — short for Times Editorial Data — which is a streamlined, user-friendly dashboard.

The backstory of TED, Pereira said, is one of “pain for everyone involved.”

Early in 2023, the newsroom had three different analytics tools that provided overlapping but inconsistent metrics, there was confusion and mistrust across the newsroom. Editorial teams were divided in their approaches: The Sunday Times focused on engagement using the Wildtime Index — a “black box” metric from the data science team — while The Times relied on page views via Parse.ly.

“There was this real concern that neither approach really reflected our ultimate goal of moving towards journalism that provides value to readers and incentivises newsrooms to create journalism that's worth paying for,” Pereira said.  

At the same time, they were publishing over 200 stories a day, with many of them failing to find an audience: “We had no shared language of what success looked like.”

That’s when Pereira proposed a bold new solution named TED.

The simple, easy-to-use dashboard centres around two core metrics: volume and engagement. The volume metric tracks how many articles fall into specific buckets based on traffic, with a key focus on reducing stories with fewer than 2,000 subscriber or guest reads.

“This was largely inspired by The Guardian, which did a content reduction project a couple of years ago,” Pereira explained. “The ultimate aim is that by addressing those low traffic articles and doing less of them, we have more time and resources to give to the ones that we do care about.”

On the engagement side, TED introduced a metric tracking the proportion of readers who spent enough time to consume at least half the article. This gave editors a clear, trustworthy signal of whether a story was delivering value to readers.

But TED is more than a dashboard, Pereira emphasised; it represents a cultural and structural shift in how The Times and The Sunday Times approach data. All reports, from dashboards to Chrome extensions, now draw from a single, unified data pipeline.

This, Pereira said, “eliminated a lot of the discrepancies that we having between reports and allowed for TED to be our single source of truth across the newsroom.”

It also led to creating a cross-functional squad across editorial analytics and data tech, with Pereira serving as the bridge between data and editorial. “Previously we were kind of of working in a real siloed way and creating different solutions,” she explained. “Now we all work together and provide one unified solution to the newsroom.”

The results speak for themselves. In its first year, sports and news desks reduced weekly story output by 30% and 20% respectively. Overall, low-readership stories dropped by 46%.

“And more than that, there’s been this huge cultural impact of the back of having TED,” Pereira said. “It’s quoted as the source of truth in the newsroom. When you walk across the newsroom and you look over people’s shoulders, you can see it on most people’s screens.

“In short, editors now start their day with data. There’s been an actual cultural newsroom transformation off the back of TED.”

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