Amalie Nash, lead of the INMA Newsroom Transformation Initiative, highlighted a key shift away from traditional metrics like pageviews, which once dominated newsroom dashboards during the recent INMA Newsroom Transformation Master Class: “That used to be something we were all paying attention to. We loved pageviews. We said, ‘Hey, huge audience! This is fantastic!’”

But as news publishers began honing in on what drove results, their attention turned to “super users,” which Nash said was “much more about subscriptions and loyalty.”

Nash discussed the evolving role of newsroom metrics in shaping editorial strategy. Drawing from her recent INMA report, Beyond the Dashboard: 14 Case Studies in Newsroom Metrics, Nash emphasised the growing industry interest in understanding how media organisations use data to drive decisions and improve audience engagement.

During the master class, media leaders from Mediahuis, Hearst Newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, and Aftenposten shared the new metrics that are guiding their journalists — and the companies’ overarching audience strategies.

Mediahuis identifies what truly matters

At Mediahuis, a European publishing group with more than 30 news brands, the newsroom dashboards look very different today than they did a few years ago.

The change wasn’t cosmetic, but cultural. As explained by Yves Van Dooren, business partner data and insights at Mediahuis, the company has moved beyond vanity metrics like pageviews to focus on what truly matters: attention time, reading quality, and audience connection.

The danger of dashboards filled with page views and click counts, he argued, is that they steer behavior. “If you put up on big screens page views or even conversions and say, ‘this is important,’ people will start writing or behaving towards those metrics.”

So Mediahuis decided to change what it measures — and, therefore, what its journalists value.

“We shifted away from those simple metrics,” Van Dooren said. “At Mediahuis, we have two things: No. 1 is engagement. Our North Star metric is engagement, calculated in time spent — it’s the attention time we are measuring.”

The second key element is reach. “The success of a certain piece is not only how it is written,” he explained. “You can have Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalism, but when you’re not promoting it on the right channels, it will not get engagement.”

Crucially, Van Dooren resists attempts to merge those dimensions into a single performance index.

“I know a lot of newsrooms are trying to combine them so that reach and engagement are combined in a kind of compound performance indicator,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. Keep your metrics simple.”

Hearst builds products to succeed around key metrics

“We want to grow, we want new readers to convert, and we want to keep those readers happy,” Tim O’Rourke, vice president of editorial innovation and AI strategy at Hearst Newspapers, said.

The editorial team there is focused on three metrics: scale, conversion, and retention. Or, as O’Rourke puts it, growing, converting, and keeping readers happy.

To find success in these three metrics, Hearst’s DevHub team is building products around both programmes and audience needs.

“What does this lead to? We focus deeply, more so now than ever, on conversions,” O’Rourke said.

This includes conversion rate, the total number of conversions, and what format and topics convert best. It’s safe to say Hearst is all in on finding new readers, getting them to subscribe and keeping them.

They’re also no longer covering every single topic happening in their markets and focusing on the things that matter most to their readers. Topics that stand out for a lot of their markets are city government, weather and climate and food. Hearst then properly staffs around producing content for those topics to be sure they have the most high value reporting of anyone else.

“Our mantra is we drive innovation across our local newsrooms, but we really meet everybody half way,” O’Rourke said.

No matter the high-value topic, they know the DevHub team must surround the newsroom with data products like tracker tools, AI-enabled assistance, and anything else to help readers navigate their local lives.

The Wall Street Journal narrows its focus

“First, what does success look like? Rather than 10,000 numbers, we aligned on four key metrics, one of which is our primary North Star,” Tess Jeffers, director of newsroom data and AI for The Wall Street Journal, said.

They also had to think about how to reach new audiences who are on target for acquisition.

“So maybe we're not for everyone,” Jeffers said. “We are for a particular type of audience who's interested in business and finance, and then we have to figure out how to convert them into paying subscribers.”

They looked at four different metrics to see if they were targeting the right audience.

1. Subscriber interest: Did they get readers to click into a story?
2. Engagement: Once they were in the story did they keep reading?
3. Purposeful reach: Did new audiences find the story?
4. Conversion rate: Did they pull out their credit card and subscribe?

“We thought a lot about these metrics because this is our definition of success,” Jeffers said. “Engagement here is our North Star because that's what the majority of people in the newsroom are working on, so we need to make sure that our journalism is as valuable and delivering as much meaning as possible for our audiences.”

Metrics support journalistic success at Aftenposten

For most journalists, “success” is a moving target — a mix of clicks, shares, and gut feeling. At Aftenposten, that used to be the case too.

“We had no clear idea of what journalistic success looked like,” admitted Kristin Kornberg, head of insight and content development at Aftenposten. “We had many different metrics … a journalist could always find a number and claim their article was a success.”

Two years ago, the newsroom decided to simplify: “We started working on engagement and introduced one single overarching goal for the newsroom,” Kornberg explained. “And that was to increase the daily number of engaged subscribers.”

Aftenposten defined an engaged subscriber as someone who reads at least 20% of an article, listens to a podcast, or watches a video. “The argument is that increased usage leads to increased loyalty,” Kornberg said. “So, creating high-quality journalism is to engage more subscribers — that is the main focus.”

This focus marked a major cultural shift. Instead of chasing clicks or raw traffic, journalists began asking: Is my story truly engaging our subscribers? The change encouraged journalists to craft stronger openings and narratives that carry readers deeper into stories.

“That means that journalists need to write in a way that draws readers in to the story right from the start,” she said.

Leaders, meanwhile, began tracking the total number of subscribers who engaged each day. “We use this to judge whether we had a good day or a bad day,” Kornberg said. On Norway’s election day, for example, Aftenposten saw “145,000 subscribers engaged on our site,” one of their best days to date.

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