Forbes reporting:
I’m pretty obsessed with watching our traffic on Forbes.com....
The image below is one of my Droid’s “home” pages. In the third row, far left, you’ll see my “shortcut” to Newsbeat, a product from Betaworks. It’s my real-time fix to see which Forbes posts are popping; how consumers are pathing through the site; where they’re coming from on the Web; how deep into the page they’re reading and much more. Next to that is a site-wide report from Omniture (a data reporting service) on unique visitors. It’s great for slicing and dicing our cumulative traffic, by channel and section, every 15 to 30 minutes and on a daily basis, too. Next to that, Omniture page views. I use it much like I do the UV report. And next to that is the mother of all Forbes Omniture stats reports. It updates at 1 am with 23 daily, monthly and annual tables — just perfect for when I can’t fall asleep or I wake up in the middle of the night either excited or worried about meeting our traffic goals.
Like I said, it’s a bit obsessive, but it is very much part of the new world of digital journalism. Our full-time staffers and contributors each have their own personal dashboard to tell them how they are doing. And, of course, each of their posts has a page-view counter in full public view. Over the last few months we’ve had some technical snafus with the public counter. When we did, our staffers and contributors expressed disappointment. They’ve come to depend on it as a feedback loop and feel somewhat in the dark without it.
Let me be clear… as I’ve said in previous posts, all these statistical reports are meant to inform our journalism, NOT to rule it. The new content engine we’re building calls for each full-time staffer and each contributor (all topic-specific experts) to be responsible for attracting and building an audience of repeat visitors — that is, loyal readers — around their brand name and their knowledge. Pandering for traffic is not brand building. Winning the respect of your audience is.
To achieve that, journalists and other experienced content creators need to apply their professionalism to the new ethos of digital publishing. They need to build a bridge from traditional media values to all those traffic numbers.
Frankly, numbers have always been a part of the news business, and the most renowned media professionals have made their peace with them. I can remember as a young journalist being taken to Abe Rosenthal’s private woodshed, a small sitting area with a black-leather-bound-sofa, to be lectured about accuracy. The next day the infamous executive editor of The New York Times was planning new “lifestyle” sections to attract more advertising dollars. At Newsweek, we talked in terms of “subscriber covers” to build the brand and “newsstand covers” to sell copies. At The New York Herald Tribune, once considered the reporter’s newspaper, similar economic issues were top most on the mind of one of my mentors, Jim Bellows (the Trib’s last editor). I can assure you he balanced the needs of that business without compromising his considerable journalistic beliefs. He did so again when he moved on to TV and had to deal with the constant fixation on Nielsen ratings
http://blogs.forbes.com/lewisdvorkin/2011/06/26/journalists-and-statistics-paying-attention-to-the-data-of-a-new-media-world
Showing posts with label analytics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label analytics. Show all posts
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Newsbeat, Chartbeat’s news-focused analytics tool, places its bets on the entrepreneurial side of news orgs
NiemanLab reporting:
Late last week, Chartbeat released a new product: Newsbeat, a tool that takes the real-time analytics it already offers and tailors them even more directly to the needs of news orgs. Chartbeat is already famously addictive, and Newsbeat will likely up the addiction ante: It includes social sharing information — including detailed info about who has been sharing stories on Twitter — and, intriguingly, notifications when stories’ traffic patterns deviate significantly from their expected path. (For more on how it works, Poynter has a good overview, and GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram followed up with a nice discussion of the decision-making implications of the tool.)
What most stood out to me, though, both when I chatted with Tony Haile, Chartbeat’s general manager, and when I poked around Newsbeat, is what the tool suggests about the inner workings of an increasingly online-oriented newsroom. Chartbeat, the parent product, offers an analytic overview of an entire site — say, Niemanlab.org — and provides a single-moment snapshot of top-performing stories site-wide. Newsbeat, on the other hand, can essentially break down the news site into its constituent elements via a permissioning system that provides personalized dashboards for individual reporters and editors. Newsbeat allows those individual journalists to see, Haile notes, “This is how my story’s doing right now. This is how my people are doing right now.”
On the one hand, that’s a fairly minor thing, an increasingly familiar shift in perspective from organization to person. Still, though, it’s worth noting the distinction Newsbeat is making between news org and news brand. Newsbeat emphasizes the individual entities that work together, sometimes in sync and sometimes not so much, under the auspices of a particular journalistic brand. So, per Newsbeat, The New York Times is The New York Times, yes…but it’s also, and to some extent more so, the NYT Business section and the NYT Politics page and infographics and and blogs and Chris Chivers and David Carr and Maureen Dowd. It’s a noisy, newsy amalgam, coherent but not constrained, its components working collectively — but not, necessarily, concertedly.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/newsbeat-chartbeats-news-focused-analytics-tool-places-its-bets-on-the-entrepreneurial-side-of-news-orgs
Late last week, Chartbeat released a new product: Newsbeat, a tool that takes the real-time analytics it already offers and tailors them even more directly to the needs of news orgs. Chartbeat is already famously addictive, and Newsbeat will likely up the addiction ante: It includes social sharing information — including detailed info about who has been sharing stories on Twitter — and, intriguingly, notifications when stories’ traffic patterns deviate significantly from their expected path. (For more on how it works, Poynter has a good overview, and GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram followed up with a nice discussion of the decision-making implications of the tool.)
What most stood out to me, though, both when I chatted with Tony Haile, Chartbeat’s general manager, and when I poked around Newsbeat, is what the tool suggests about the inner workings of an increasingly online-oriented newsroom. Chartbeat, the parent product, offers an analytic overview of an entire site — say, Niemanlab.org — and provides a single-moment snapshot of top-performing stories site-wide. Newsbeat, on the other hand, can essentially break down the news site into its constituent elements via a permissioning system that provides personalized dashboards for individual reporters and editors. Newsbeat allows those individual journalists to see, Haile notes, “This is how my story’s doing right now. This is how my people are doing right now.”
On the one hand, that’s a fairly minor thing, an increasingly familiar shift in perspective from organization to person. Still, though, it’s worth noting the distinction Newsbeat is making between news org and news brand. Newsbeat emphasizes the individual entities that work together, sometimes in sync and sometimes not so much, under the auspices of a particular journalistic brand. So, per Newsbeat, The New York Times is The New York Times, yes…but it’s also, and to some extent more so, the NYT Business section and the NYT Politics page and infographics and and blogs and Chris Chivers and David Carr and Maureen Dowd. It’s a noisy, newsy amalgam, coherent but not constrained, its components working collectively — but not, necessarily, concertedly.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/newsbeat-chartbeats-news-focused-analytics-tool-places-its-bets-on-the-entrepreneurial-side-of-news-orgs
The Impact of Next-Generation Data on the Practice of Journalism By Alexis Madrigal
The Atlantic reporting:
How having access to more and more data about who is reading your stories when and where could help make journalism better
Over at GigaOm, Mathew Ingram has a fine write-up about NewsBeat, the journalism-centric product from the real-time analytics company ChartBeat. The thesis is that having more and better data about the traffic to stories may actually be good thing. That runs counter to the conventional wisdom that if journalists know how many people are visiting their stories, they'll immediately start writing about [fill in pop culture reference du jour] and [reference to cats]. Having been in places where journalists had access to data, I completely agree with Ingram that stats don't cause a race to the bottom. It's just another one of a dozen competing concerns that enter into writing the next story (always the next).
From an editor's perspective, ChartBeat -- and I'm assuming NewsBeat, though I haven't personally used it -- is fantastic. You can see at a glance how and why something is generating a lot of traffic. The data exposes the plumbing of the Interwebs, all the little mini-networks that pick something up and turn it from something published on your site to something living on the Internet....I love analytics because I owe them my ability to write weird stories on the Internet. I like to publish stories that don't seem to belong on a "blog," as many people traditionally have understood the term. We publish 1,500+ word stories reexamining email as a writing tool for professors or laser etching on gravestones or advances in pizza box design. (Our new longreads category collects some of these stories up.) While not all of these pieces generate a lot of traffic, a surprising amount do. It is the success of this kind of long-form technology writing that allows us to keep doing it.
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8672091774752856243
How having access to more and more data about who is reading your stories when and where could help make journalism better
Over at GigaOm, Mathew Ingram has a fine write-up about NewsBeat, the journalism-centric product from the real-time analytics company ChartBeat. The thesis is that having more and better data about the traffic to stories may actually be good thing. That runs counter to the conventional wisdom that if journalists know how many people are visiting their stories, they'll immediately start writing about [fill in pop culture reference du jour] and [reference to cats]. Having been in places where journalists had access to data, I completely agree with Ingram that stats don't cause a race to the bottom. It's just another one of a dozen competing concerns that enter into writing the next story (always the next).
From an editor's perspective, ChartBeat -- and I'm assuming NewsBeat, though I haven't personally used it -- is fantastic. You can see at a glance how and why something is generating a lot of traffic. The data exposes the plumbing of the Interwebs, all the little mini-networks that pick something up and turn it from something published on your site to something living on the Internet....I love analytics because I owe them my ability to write weird stories on the Internet. I like to publish stories that don't seem to belong on a "blog," as many people traditionally have understood the term. We publish 1,500+ word stories reexamining email as a writing tool for professors or laser etching on gravestones or advances in pizza box design. (Our new longreads category collects some of these stories up.) While not all of these pieces generate a lot of traffic, a surprising amount do. It is the success of this kind of long-form technology writing that allows us to keep doing it.
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8672091774752856243
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