Doors open to the Westin workshop room at this time. If you haven’t already picked up your badge and registration credentials for World Congress, please do so now – and network with peers with a welcome coffee.

Using data to tackle everyday business challenges with audience, advertising, and editorial is the focus of this half-day workshop curated by Smart Data Initiative Lead Ariane Bernard.

The New York Times uses a metered access service for its paywall experience so that non-subscribers can read a fixed number of articles every month. This number is a crucial part of balancing the trade-off between user engagement with Times’ content and subscription growth. Rohit Supekar will explain how they use machine learning by leveraging the first-party engagement data of registered users to determine personalised meter limits ... all while optimising and balancing the trade-off between their business KPIs.

Capturing, cleaning, compiling, and considering data to provide the best insights does not directly translate to solid business decisions. So, how do you determine the value of all the analytics team’s work? How do you connect the effort to the outcome? June Dershewitz, a longtime data strategist who sits on the board of the Digital Analytics Association, will describe the creation, delivery, and value of measuring analytical throughput.

In the last few months, generative AI models such as ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion have taken the world by storm. How can newsrooms use them to enhance their reporting? In this session, Ippen Media demonstrates how it integrates generative AI tools into its CMS. Alessandro Alviani will discuss the challenges that these tools present, review how editors and key stakeholders can be effectively included in the AI product development lifecycle, and provide an outlook on the next steps.

Extracting the real monetary value of your advertising business is critical to long-term engagement from both advertisers and audiences, alike. Until now, highly granular data on campaigns and creatives running on your sites hasn’t been connected to audience behavior data. Piano will reveal how publishers can now obtain these metrics and start making more informed decisions about advertising campaigns, audience and data acquisition, editorial planning, subscription offerings and marketing strategies.

To derive the insights necessary to expand its subscriber base, The Atlantic must distill a comprehensive view of our subscribers and prospects from a myriad of data sources. Unifying raw data from payment providers, online analytics, messaging platforms and print fulfillment partners has been a years-long endeavor from which The Atlantic's data team has learned many lessons. Evan Sandhaus, the VP of engineering at The Atlantic, will share with us the story of this effort and provide insight into the tools, techniques and strategies his team leverages to fuse data from these multiple sources into an actionable view of The Atlantic's audience

The layout of a Web site influences what is clicked. This is especially important for news web sites. Articles with large pictures on top of the page are more likely to be clicked than articles with just a headline at the bottom of the page. So how can trending news be identified if counting clicks alone is not enough? Christian Leschinski will give an overview of how Axel Springer National Media and Tech leverages data science to tell the real story of an article.

Being an authoritative source to a community starts with providing coverage of daily and severe weather, and putting that coverage into context. The USA Today Network of newsrooms reaches shore to shore in the United States, and the central team at Gannett saw an opportunity to automate weather updates using natural language generation templates. The project reduces newsroom toil and builds authority and trust on weather and environment coverage. Jessica Davis, the Senior Director for News Automation and AI Product at Gannett will share with us the learnings from the company's prototypes, human-in-the-loop workflows, audience impact and feedback.

After takeaways from today’s workshop, learn what the Smart Data Initiative is doing next – and how you and your teams can participate.

Be welcomed to World Congress Week in style tonight with the Welcome Reception at Central Park’s iconic Tavern On the Green. Come early and stay late in this landmark restaurant originally designed as a sheep house that has served locals, presidents, royalty, artists, and actors since 1934. Re-connect with INMA peers from around the world and punctuate the evening with the famous Stan Rubin Orchestra – known for their legendary Saturday evening performances at the nearby Carnegie Club. Attire is business casual. You will need your INMA badge for security upon entrance at Tavern On the Green.

Location:
Tavern On the Green
West 67th Street (Central Park)