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 introduces TED

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.

Aftenposten identifies single goal with metrics

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.

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