Panel Title: The Value Of Attention: Metrics, Methods and Outcomes

Moderator: Jason Alcorn, MediaShift
Panelists: Clare Carr, Parse.ly; Evan Mackinder, Slate; Byard Duncan, Reveal/CIR

The difference between building a loyal audience and getting lost in the noise online? Measuring and valuing audience attention in your organization. Getting this right allows you to connect with readers the moment it matters.

This live online panel will include a discussion with publishers who have spent their time figuring out what matters to their audience and how they can measure it well. Hear how they’re writing better stories, creating innovative products and experiences, and finding new revenue for their businesses.

This free online panel is sponsored by Parse.ly. Parse.ly empowers companies to understand, own and improve digital audience engagement through data, so they can ensure the work they do makes the impact it deserves. All attendee emails will be shared with the webinar sponsor.

Handouts:

– Presentations will be available to participants.

Who should attend:

Journalists, editors, growth managers, social media editors, marketers, publishers, non-profits, and content creators interested in learning about engagement metrics.

Date and Time: June 20, 2018, 10 am PT / 1 pm ET

Free!

Register now for the online panel!

Note: If you can’t attend the live session, you can still register and see the archived video of the panel. Free registration for BigMarker is required.

About the Moderator:

Jason Alcorn is the metrics and impact editor at MediaShift. As a consultant he advises news organizations on business strategy and leadership and works with funders to develop program strategies. He also facilitates the Institute for Nonprofit News Emerging Leaders Council. Jason lives in Washington, D.C., with his family. You can follow Jason on Twitter at @jasonalcorn.

About the Panelists:

Clare Carr leads Parse.ly’s marketing team. She focuses on helping companies understand the power of audience’s attention. She contributes to MetricShift, Native Ad Institute, Digital Content Next, and speaks across the world on digital analytics, data, and marketing. You can follow her on Twitter @clareondrey.

Evan Mackinder is a senior audience engagement editor at Slate. Previously he was the digital engagement manager at the Sunlight Foundation and outreach coordinator at the Center for Responsive Politics. You can follow him on Twitter @evandmac.

Byard Duncan is Reveal’s engagement reporter. He leads social media strategy, writes The Weekly Reveal newsletter and helps spearhead a variety of audience engagement initiatives. His reporting for Reveal has spanned a variety of topics, including law enforcement, cybersecurity policy and the opioid crisis. He also has written for GQ, Esquire, The California Sunday Magazine and Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets. He was the winner of a 2015 feature storytelling award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter. You can follow him on Twitter @ByardDuncan.

The post DigitalEd Panel: The Value Of Attention: Metrics, Methods and Outcomes appeared first on MediaShift.

Matt Carlson, Associate Professor at St. Louis University

Matt Carlson, an associate professor of communication at Saint Louis University, was set to announce a collaborative research project that would “connect a lot of dots surrounding news metrics and digital distribution platforms.” He wanted to examine journalism’s embrace of real-time audience data by shining a spotlight on “all the different actors involved, from reporters and editors and news management to engineers and salespersons at data analytic firms to the audience on the other end.”

But first, he needed to find a term that tied everything together. “Measurable journalism” was the solution.

In a special issue of the academic journal Digital Journalism, “Measurable Journalism: Digital Platforms, News Metrics, and the Quantified Audience,” nine researchers explore the implications of these technological and cultural shifts. Carlson, who edited the special issue and wrote an introductory essay, “Confronting Measurable Journalism,” explained his interest in this topic in an e-mail to MediaShift: 

“When we think about measurable journalism, we need to keep in mind all the parts that go into it without privileging one over another. Often discussions of news metrics focus on technology, but it is equally about human actions that direct technology to do x and not y.

A concern I have with measurable journalism is when what can be measured takes precedent over what should be measured. These are sophisticated technologies, but they can only ever get to what people do. What we can’t know is what news audiences think or why they do what they do. I am always worried that user data becomes so fetishized that we forget it can only ever be a partial representation. We talk about such complex terms as impact or engagement but then we look for simple measurements.

The idea of measurable journalism can be both promising with the hope of creating journalism that is more accountable to the audience and frightening with the threat of journalists losing control over what is newsworthy. It may bring journalists and their audiences closer together or it might push economic imperatives ahead of journalism’s public service mission. Given these outcomes, what we need is vigilance and a solid understanding of all the forces in play.”

MediaShift discussed these forces in short interviews with the researchers who contributed to the special issue.

Quantified Audiences in News Production: A Synthesis and Research Agenda

Interview with Rodrigo Zamith, assistant professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

There are two main reasons. The first has to do with a professional observation: Journalism is becoming more sensitive to and powered by measurement. We see this in the rise of “data journalism” as well as the proliferation of audience analytics — the latter being the focus of much of my recent work. Those shifts have important implications for how journalism is constructed, performed and rewarded, yet the phenomenon is not yet well understood by scholars (or practitioners). The second reason is personal: I’m a nerd and think in terms of numbers. I find the tensions playing out as quantification and quantitatively oriented actors gain foothold in newsrooms to be fascinating.

What did your research show?

My contribution focused on synthesizing the current literature on audience analytics and metrics, offering new lenses for studying the phenomenon and identifying future research directions for the scholarship. Three arguments stand out in the piece: First, we are witnessing a new wave of audience measurement in journalism (following two waves in the 1930s and 1970s) that is driven by audience analytics (systems that automatically capture information about individuals’ media use). Second, while contemporary journalism is not being driven by quantifications of audiences (i.e., audience metrics), both audiences and quantification are playing far more prominent roles in news production than in the past. Third, scholars and practitioners have become less pessimistic about the impact of audience metrics and now recognize more nuanced impacts on news production as well as opportunities for using them to advance journalistic goals.

I have a new piece out (in Digital Journalism) arguing that we are witnessing a third wave of audience measurement in journalism and synthesizing the knowledge across 5 areas related to news production: https://t.co/G1Fzu3rGwo. Feedback welcome! #ddj #journalism #metrics

— Rodrigo Zamith (@rodzam) March 7, 2018

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

Journalists and educators need to take analytics and metrics seriously. The measurement of audiences will only become more sophisticated and news organizations will face further pressures to make use of those data. Journalists should seek out training on how to use their newsrooms’ analytics suites (e.g., Chartbeat) and/or ask for permission to access the system. Educators need to ensure they incorporate analytics and metrics into their curricula and also provide students the opportunity to engage with those suites (e.g., integrating them into student media offerings, at minimum). In both cases, serious conversations need to be had about how to use those data sensibly — from influencing organizational coverage decisions to developing reward structures for individual journalists. I find the argument that metrics should neither be restricted to the business side nor the primary driver of journalism to be especially persuasive. Analytics are tools that can be put to good use, and that means trying to align journalistic aims like satisfying community information needs with the many data points that analytics can offer. At the same time, those tools can be misused and practitioners should therefore maintain a healthy skepticism and promote robust dialogue.

The Audience-Oriented Editor: Making Sense of the Audience in the Newsroom

Interview with Raul Ferrer-Conill, Ph.D. candidate, Karlstad University, Sweden, and Edson C. Tandoc, Jr., assistant professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

In the last decades we’ve seen an increasing quantification of journalism, spurred by the use of metrics and analytics. These metrics are effectively the new way by which news organizations make sense of the audience. Combined with the commercial urgency, the need to entice and engage audiences makes the quantification of audience news consumption a key factor to understand the current news production process. Researchers and practitioners should pay more attention to how journalism production is quantified, measured and understood.

What did your research show?

First, the definition of engagement is almost entirely centered on different types of metrics. Second, while audience-oriented editors take part in the editorial process, their role is to help journalists negotiate between the information obtained by their metrics and their journalistic intuition to make editorial decisions. Third, there is a lack of cohesiveness regarding what these newsroom positions are and how they operate. We provide insight on the pervasiveness of metrics and quantification of journalistic processes by offering a more nuanced understanding of a new set of editorial roles.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

The more that metrics are part of news production and the increasing number of audience-oriented editors legitimize and institutionalize metrics. Therefore, understanding the impact of audience measurement on news work requires an analysis of these emerging roles, who act as intermediaries between audiences and the newsroom through their interpretation and valuation of audience data. The reliance on metrics and social media insights questions their capacity to capture the audience. The analytic tools are constrained by what they can measure and rely on likes, shares, number of comments and other audience metrics to define engagement. In this sense, it is user activity and behavior that becomes a proxy for the voice of the audience. This is a limited understanding of the audience, let alone having a dialog with the audience. Editors can assess the performance of their editorial choices as they scrutinize metrics in real time, but they are limited by and reliant on the technological affordances of the tools they use. We argue that this dialog is predominantly informed by metrics and therefore it needs to be understood as such. Metrics are not necessarily a valid way to measure audience engagement and should be used cautiously.

Selecting Metrics, Reflecting Norms: How Journalists in Local Newsrooms Define, Measure, and Discuss Impact

Interview with Elia Powers, assistant professor, Towson University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

My interest is in examining the ways in which journalists think about and ultimately measure their work’s impact. Impact is a buzzword in newsrooms, but there are so many ways to define the term that little can be done to move the conversation forward until there’s more clarity about what journalists mean when they talk about impact. It’s also critical for journalists to feel comfortable publicly discussing their work’s impact, because newsrooms now more than ever need to make the case to audiences and funders that civic-oriented journalism makes a difference in local communities.

What did your research show?

Interviews with journalists from a range of local news organizations in one U.S. city found that they welcome the opportunity to inform audiences and effect change, and they had no issues discussing impact with newsroom colleagues and in promotional materials. However, journalists were generally more hesitant to discuss their work’s impact outside the newsroom — in follow-up news stories, social media posts, interviews, etc. Some journalists were concerned about being perceived as too self-congratulatory or being labeled advocates. There was a perception among some participants that publicizing impact violated journalistic standards of objectivity and detachment. Additionally, journalists had many ways of defining and measuring impact, one of which was audience analytics — although many felt these were more about engagement than enduring signs of impact. Effect-oriented metrics (audience awareness, public discourse, public policy, etc) were widely considered the best to assess impact but among the most difficult to systematically measure.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

First, I propose that measurable journalism should not be limited to quantitative metrics, often the standard by which news coverage is judged. Much of what journalists want to measure has little to do with audience analytics. Second, as I argue in the article, “publicizing the impact of journalism, when facts support such a claim, is central to the journalistic process and necessary for newsrooms to justify their funding…Newsroom policies and professional codes of conduct should clarify that engaging in public discourse on impact is central to the journalistic process, a necessary part of communicating with the public, and a way for newsrooms to justify their funding rather than a sign of self-promotion or
advocacy.”

Dimensional Field Theory: The Adoption of Audience Metrics in the Journalistic Field and Cross-field Influences

Interview with Qun Wang, Ph.D. Candidate, Rutgers University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Fifteen years ago, I was a TV news anchor and reporter in Beijing, China. I was able to access both quantitative and qualitative audience information due to the nature of the show that I covered: on the one hand, we kept a close eye on the ratings because the show was a signature show in Beijing’s competitive TV news market; on the other hand, we had our ears open to the three hotline phones on which the show relied for audience members to share news tips, feedback and comments like “I don’t like the anchor’s hair!” We sometimes learned a lot from the audience information and sometimes got lost in it. The show ceased years ago, but I have never stopped wondering how the team would deal with today’s audience information in the digital age if the show was still around. This work experience and this particular question have contributed to my interest in measurable journalism.

What did your research show?

In the years that I worked in the newsroom, I already felt that newsroom practices and norms were often a result of the negotiation of different forces. In my study, drawing on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I took a historical and relational approach to embed the journalistic field into a wider media ecosystem. Particularly, the study examines how the adoption of audience metrics in news media has been shaped by influences inside and outside the journalistic field in order to understand the origin, driving forces and implications of this trend. I looked at neighboring fields adjacent to the journalistic field, such as the online advertising and online audience research fields, as well as web analytics services working with news media that I identified as the intermediate field to trace the evolution and influence of these fields. I also looked into the journalistic field itself and identified three dimensions — the techno-economic means, the subject of journalism and the object of journalism — that construct the field and serve as sources of internal influence.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

The main takeaway of this study is that the journalistic field is not a static or monolithic arena. Rather, it is a social universe that is subject to and constantly interacts with cross-field influences. Therefore, to understand the root, development and effects of measurable journalism, we may need to inspect our own field and look elsewhere.

Boundary Work, Interloper Media, and Analytics in Newsrooms: An Analysis of Web Analytics Companies’ Role in News Production

Interview with Valerie Belair-Gagnon, assistant professor, University of Minnesota, and Avery Holton, assistant professor, University of Utah

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Journalism has been undergoing a series of fascinating changes for several decades. In particular, social media has challenged the ways in which we measure the success of journalism. Much of that success still rests in financial growth, or at least stability, which itself is increasingly dependent on audience interactions with journalists and the content they produce. We’ve begun moving past a reliance on journalistic or editorial intuition and instead see tangible value in understanding complex web metrics and analytics. So if the latter are beginning to drive journalistic decision making, particularly in news production and professional identity, then they are critical to examine.

https://twitter.com/journoscholar/status/969222955677908992

What did your research show?

Our most recent research shows that web analytics companies seek to understand and address news production values and norms without assuming responsibility as journalists. We think of these companies, or their employees more specifically, as implicit media interlopers. These are journalistic outsiders, more or less, who are bit more welcome in the journalistic process than previous interlopers (e.g., citizen journalists, bloggers) because of the value they add to news products. These companies also foster profit-oriented norms and values in newsrooms by introducing web analytics as disruptive, connective and routinized in news production. By offering a product that needs to be modified on a continuous basis because of changes in the structure of the web and audience behaviors, web analytics companies foster a milieu of constant experimentation with old and new products. This helps place them squarely in the middle of evolving news organizations that are turning more to disruptors and innovators as they grapple for financial footing.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

Today, like many other technological innovations in newsroom, disruption increasingly comes from innovations from outside companies and individuals. As journalism evolves, scholars and practitioners need to understand more deeply what the values and practices are that these disruptive innovators bring to journalism. We’re not just talking about web analytics here, but rather programmers, app developers, drone hobbyists, and others who are interacting with journalists and news organizations in ways that are giving new meaning to what exactly journalism is and who exactly is doing it.

Engineering Consent: How the Design and Marketing of Newsroom Analytics Tools Rationalize Journalists’ Labor

Interview with Caitlin Petre, assistant professor, Rutgers University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Way back in 2010, Nick Denton, founder of the now-defunct Gawker Media, said, “probably the biggest thing in internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability.” Superlatives are tricky, but Denton was surely right that the unprecedented ability to measure audience behaviors and demographics is a defining characteristic of digital media — one that has major implications for the working conditions in this industry and the kind of journalism that is produced. Media scholars have an urgent role to play in helping to interpret and explain the causes, manifestations and consequences of measurable media.

What did your research show?

In the early stages of my research on the role of analytics in journalism, I kept encountering the same puzzle. Journalists at a wide range of news outlets would profess a profound wariness or even hostility toward analytics tools, often seeing them as a threat to their professional autonomy and integrity. This by itself wasn’t all that surprising: Sociological research has found that workers (especially those, like journalists, who consider themselves to possess some kind of special knowledge or expertise) often resist the implementation of technologies that quantify their performance and rank them against each other.

But even as they regarded analytics tools with suspicion and resentment, journalists didn’t seem to be resisting them very much. On the contrary, many journalists would describe feeling “addicted” to real-time analytics tools, consulting them more frequently than was required or even encouraged by their managers, and scheming about how to boost their stats.

My article aims to figure out why that is. I find that a big part of the answer has to do with something that often gets overlooked in these discussions: the design and marketing of real-time newsroom analytics tools. Newsroom analytics companies engineer their dashboards to provide a user experience that is strongly habit-forming, flattering and emotionally compelling. The resulting products are so “sticky” that explicit managerial coercion to boost traffic (which many journalists would not take kindly to) becomes unnecessary. Once journalists get hooked on looking at real-time analytics tools, they begin to monitor themselves. They also push themselves to work harder and harder in hopes of gaining ever-higher traffic.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

When we have conversations about analytics in journalism, we tend to focus on which metrics are provided: time spent or page views? Scroll depth or uniques? In other words, we assess the merit of each metric and speculate about the kind of journalism it might incentivize. But my findings indicate that anyone seeking to make sense of the role of analytics in contemporary journalism should be just as attentive to the way the data are presented, and the daily experience of using these tools, as we are to the metrics themselves.

The Elusive Engagement Metric

Interview with Jacob Nelson, Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism? 

Over the past few years, a growing number of journalism stakeholders and researchers have argued that newsrooms should make “audience engagement” one of their chief pursuits. This term has many interpretations that stem from one underlying belief: Journalists better serve their audiences when they explicitly focus on how their audiences interact with and respond to the news in the first place. However, those who hope to make audience engagement a larger part of journalistic practice need to first settle an internal debate surrounding how audience engagement should be defined and evaluated. Because the term currently lacks an agreed upon meaning — let alone metric — it has become an object of contestation. The efforts to make audience engagement central to news production therefore present an opportunity to learn how journalism is changing, as well as who within the field have the power to change it.

My latest article looks at how @wearehearken persuades newsrooms to adopt audience engagement as a goal, and the institutional obstacles they navigate in the process. https://t.co/cAXzUP5vFf

— Jacob Nelson (@jnelz) March 6, 2018

What did your research show?

My study draws on an ethnographic case study of Hearken, a company that offers audience engagement tools and consulting to about 100 news organizations worldwide. Findings show that news industry confusion surrounding how audience engagement should be defined and measured has left Hearken unable to quantify the benefit of its offerings. The news industry currently privileges measures of audience size, so newsrooms face economic incentives to pursue audience growth (which they can measure) rather than audience engagement (which they can’t). Instead, Hearken’s pitch to newsrooms relies primarily on appeals to intuition. Its employees argue that their interpretation of audience engagement will lead to a better quality of journalism, which will inevitably result in increased audience revenue as well. Though some newsrooms refuse to invest in Hearken’s offerings without proof they will yield some measurable return, others seem eager to take the chance. The success of Hearken’s faith-based approach indicates that many in journalism innately believe the profession should improve its relationship with the audience.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics? 

Hearken’s effort to spread its interpretation of audience engagement is just one piece of an ongoing public contest to determine journalistic practice. There are countless conversations about audience engagement that occur annually at a variety of journalism practice and research conferences. These conversations tend to include editors, reporters, and publishers, but rarely include employees of companies like comScore and Nielsen who are in the business of understanding how audiences behave. What makes this omission confounding is the fact that these firms are having their own conversations about audience engagement. The fact that these conversations are taking place shows that the major players within the news media environment believe that how audiences engage with media is worthy of consideration. On the other hand, the fact that these stakeholders with disparate interpretations of audience engagement have yet to come together reflects just how convoluted the term has become. How the term is ultimately defined and measured will have consequences not just for how journalists produce the news, but also what they expect of public – as well as what the public expects of them.

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and nonprofit journalism.

The post What Research on ‘Measurable Journalism’ Tells Us About Tech, Cultural Shifts in Digital Media appeared first on MediaShift.

Twitter accounts for less then 2.5 percent of traffic to publishers; Instagram and Pinterest barely supply one percent together. Currently, Facebook represents 22 percent, but its role in distributing publishers’ content has been falling dramatically for more than a year, and is only accelerating.

Data from Parse.ly, which tracks visits to more than 2,500 publishers, shows that ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, more than 40 percent of traffic to those sites came from Facebook. By the end of 2017, it was less than 26 percent. It’s still dropping. For some sites, like BuzzFeed, this is a big problem, but even if you don’t rely on social traffic to the same extent, it’s a challenge.

The chart below shows the amount of traffic coming to publishers from Google and Facebook since the beginning of 2017. It’s not just Facebook’s decline — the huge growth in Google mobile visitors is very striking. This can largely be attributed to the growing popularity of AMP, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages format for the mobile web.

Source: Chartbeat

Social traffic was never a great way to make money anyway

How much was social referral traffic really worth? As Scott Galloway points out in this great video, Audience vs. Traffic: “People don’t tune in to BuzzFeed because they’re fascinated by the journalism, they click because someone forwarded them ‘Pick some of your favorite potato dishes and we’ll tell you your best quality.’” Social referrals are fickle, hard to monetize, and disappear when Facebook changes the algorithms. They’re traffic, not an audience. Even before Facebook’s changes, BuzzFeed had apparently been seeing a decline in unique US visitors for two years.

In many ways the decline in social referrals is just the icing on a pretty unappetizing cake for traffic-dependant sites, which struggle to monetize beyond programmatic ads. Yields are declining, the use of ad-blockers is on the rise and Facebook and Google are hogging all the growth. Meanwhile, those sites that managed to build a loyal audience, like the New York Times and many special interest magazine sites, are flourishing — usually by using that loyalty to monetize in other areas like subscriptions or e-commerce.

Social traffic was never all that great for anything other than reporting big numbers. While that doesn’t change the fact that content distributed directly on platforms can be an important acquisition channel (e.g. The Economist has used Facebook as an effective way to retarget potential subscribers), that only really works if you can convert your off-site viewers into paying subscribers. Monetizing content on somebody else’s platform is really tough. Your company’s account on Instagram may have a lot of followers, but how much value is that generating, and is it going to you or the platform? As a friend likes to say: “Everyone knows National Geographic has amazing photography, but how many people remember the names of individual photographers?”

Long-term, the move away from desperately trying to drive and monetize social referral traffic is a necessary step, but right now it’s still hurting many people. So, how can you thrive despite Facebook’s continuing retreat from publishing?

The antidote to declining social traffic

One answer is Google. As the Chartbeat graphic shows, Google is quickly regaining its status as the primary source of referrals for publishers. So the main question becomes, how do you drive more large scale, organic traffic to your website via the search engine result pages (SERPs)?

Basically, you need to refocus your efforts away from social traffic and re-energize your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) team. As a quick refresher, SEO is the umbrella term for many tactics, all of which aims to optimize your content for search engine algorithms, so that you rank higher when a potential visitor asks a query. The higher you rank, the better your natural traffic becomes, and the more chances you get to convert that traffic into a loyal, revenue generating audience. However, SEO in 2018 is not the SEO you remember: Google is always tinkering with algorithms and features (like AMP), and that means the best SEO tactics constantly change. Sometimes quite radically.

What are the ranking factors that influence your SEO score most these days? Google famously doesn’t give us full transparency on ranking factors, but recently large studies by intelligence platforms such as SEMrush have shed some light into the ranking darkness. The answers probably aren’t what you expect.

The days of keyword stuffing are over

No, it’s not keywords (in the anchor, body, title or anywhere else) or backlinks. It’s your engagement metrics. The top four ranking factors are direct website visits, time on site, pages per session and bounce rate. This isn’t surprising really when you think about it: Google wants to find the ‘best’ answers for queries, so happy Google users are a key indicator for them. What they’ve worked out is that engagement indicators, like low bounce rate, high pages per session and superior dwell time, are the best signs of a good search answer. They’re also hard to game, which can’t be said for keywords and backlinks.

This all means that there is now another very obvious reason to try to increase your engagement metrics: high engagement is a virtuous cycle. More engagement directly means more new organic traffic, which in turn means a greater opportunity to monetize your site and build a loyal audience, which means higher engagement and more organic traffic.

Source: SEMrush

SEMrush’s study results are backed by industry experts such as Larry Kim, Founder & CTO of WordStream. He says that “having positive website engagement metrics is critical” and he presents the data that shows the relationship between engagement rates (such as bounce rate and time on site) and rankings here.

So, yes, you shouldn’t ignore keywords and backlinks, but the biggest opportunity to increase organic traffic from Google comes directly from boosting on-site engagement metrics. This is especially true for established sites that already rank fairly well.

That leaves one question: how do you improve your SEO? If you’re already creating great content, what can you do that will impact these metrics right now?

How to effectively raise your site engagement and search traffic

SEO expert Matthew Woodward describes internal link building and content recirculation as “the most powerful SEO tactic you are not using.” Why? It increases engagement.

Internal content recommendations are the best way to help readers discover relevant content that they really want to read. This means fewer people leaving after reading just one article, more articles per session and more time on your site. Most importantly, the more of your content they explore, the more likely they’ll be to come back. Search visitors can be fickle if they’ve come looking for a particular piece of content, and often leave as soon as they’ve consumed it. You give yourself the best chance of converting them into a loyal audience member by providing other high-quality content that’s relevant to their interests.

Content recommendation is even more important when you consider that, for over half of publishers, less than 10 percent of visitors enter the site via the homepage, according to research by Parse.ly. This means your content pages also have to do the job of the homepage and help people find the next piece of interesting content.

What all this adds up to is this: the related and recommended content widgets on your content pages are the single most important performance unit you have. Measure them and optimize them!

Social media can still work great as an acquisition channel for publishers and media companies, but as a dependable traffic- and revenue-driver it’s a busted flush. You can’t rely on it to drive engaged traffic to your site, the principal source of sustainable revenue. Now that Google is the most important referral source again, SEO has a renewed importance, and the days of keyword stuffing are behind us. You should be doing everything you can to improve your user experience. An easy way to do this right now, as well as implementing tools like AMP, is great recommendations.

Mads Holmen is co-founder and CEO at Bibblio, a leading provider of personalization and content recommendation services. He’s a passionate “better web” advocate and recognized publishing industry commentator.

The post It’s Time For Publishers To Get Bullish On SEO Once Again appeared first on MediaShift.

Panel Title: Loyalty and Revenue: The New User Metrics

Moderator: Jason Alcorn, MediaShift
Panelists: Denise Law, The Economist; Dave Burdick, Denverite

What user metrics matter most when reader loyalty is your goal? Right now a tectonic shift is happening in publishing from a click-driven era to one that is community-driven. How publishers respond today can determine if they will succeed in building an audience that shows up tomorrow and every day after.

This panel will include a discussion with publishers who are the forefront of thinking about how to measure user loyalty in this new community-driven era to strengthen their brands and use a loyal readership to grow revenue for their businesses.

This free online panel is sponsored by Opinary. Opinary enables users to share their opinion in-content, helping publishers and brands reach, understand and convert their most valuable audiences. Publishing partners – including global leaders like The Times, HuffPost, NBC etc., use Opinary to engage and monetize their audiences, while global brands like Toyota or Mastercard boost attention, create conversions and generate insights. All attendee emails will be shared with the panel sponsor.

Handouts:

– Presentations will be available to participants.

Who should attend:

Journalists, editors, growth managers, social media editors, marketers, publishers, non-profits, and content creators interested in learning about engagement metrics.

Date and Time: May 2, 2018, 10 am PT / 1 pm ET

Free!

Register now for the online panel!

Note: If you can’t attend the live session, you can still register and see the archived video of the panel. Free registration for BigMarker is required.

About the Moderator:

Jason Alcorn is the metrics and impact editor at MediaShift. As a consultant he advises news organizations on business strategy and leadership and works with funders to develop program strategies. He also facilitates the Institute for Nonprofit News Emerging Leaders Council. Jason lives in Washington, D.C., with his family. You can follow Jason on Twitter at @jasonalcorn.

About the Panelists:

Denise Law is head of strategic product development at The Economist where she is leading an initiative to accelerate the development of our website, new mobile app and newsletters. Previously, she led the social media team for two years. Denise began her career as a journalist at the Financial Times in London and Hong Kong, where she helped to set up several online-only news publications. A native of Toronto, Denise has lived and worked in London, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Utrecht.

Dave Burdick is the editor of Denverite, part of Spirited Media. He has previously worked at the Denver Post, the Daily Camera, the Huffington Post, Naropa University up in Boulder and at a Best Buy near a suburban mall circa “Now That’s What I Call Music” volume 4. His parents are retired local newspaper journalists, and he is married to a freelance journalist. Dave lives in Denver with her, their two children and a very good dog.

The post DigitalEd: Loyalty and Revenue: The New User Metrics appeared first on MediaShift.

It’s Time To Revisit Engagement Metrics
Jason Alcorn
To better measure engagement, go back to the old tools.

To Build And Engage Your Audience, Consider These Core Metrics For Measuring Success
Steve Mulder and Mark Fuerst / Current
The results of a public media working group on KPIs and key metrics.

Using Data To Measure Impact
Eric Martin / ITVS
Good ideas for journalism in this study of documentary filmmakers.

Recirculate! Vox Media’s New Structure For Story Packages Gives Readers Context (And Helps Them Stick Around)
Christine Schmidt / Nieman Lab
How a new template increased recirculation on Vox Media sites.

The Financial Times Uses YouTube To Boost Subscriptions
Lucinda Southern / Digiday
Readers come into contact with the FT brand 6 to 8 times before subscribing.

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How Publishers Are Learning to Embrace Twitter Video
Liam Corcoran

How A Local Newsroom In Brazil Learned To Track Its Impact
Sam Berkhead

How WhereBy.Us Will Track Impact of Local Media
Jason Alcorn

Knight Media Forum Focuses on Non-Profit News, Impact and Danger of Algorithms
Jason Alcorn

Jason Alcorn (@jasonalcorn) is the Metrics Editor for MediaShift. In addition to his work with MediaShift, he works as a consultant with non-profits and newsrooms.

The post Media Metrics Roundup for March 28, 2018 appeared first on MediaShift.

At many publishers, community and engagement editors have long been pushing for a change in the newsroom culture away from superficial metrics toward a more authentic relationship with readers. Yet that culture shift was often impeded by the value and sheer size of the Facebook audience, whose reach, distributed audience and referral traffic publishers came to rely on to hit their analytics and advertising goals.

Well that particular barrier has fallen. And now is a good time to talk about better engagement metrics.

When engagement is no longer defined as the total number of likes, reactions and shares by a aggregate audience and is instead an interaction with a particular reader of your website or publication, increasingly one you can identify by name, what are the best ways to measure that? A handful of recent examples point the way to a better set of measurement practices that rethink traditional digital analytics and refocus attention on key performance indicators.

Measuring New Engagement With Old Web Metrics

The return to loyal users is a return to traditional web metrics. But instead of page views and total unique users, publishers are using time on site and frequency of visit to take the measure of their web audience. Loyal users are more likely to seek out the site on their own, leading to the return of the home page as a priority for publishers. They are more likely to spend time on the site and more likely to come back more often. The bounce rate for a loyal audience will typically be lower than the bounce rate for users arriving from social media.

These are metrics that have always been available to publishers but that have often been overlooked.

The product team at Vox has been using web analytics to measure and grow reader loyalty. As they rethink the on-site editorial experience for their readers post-Facebook, the team is looking at how to package content to show readers relevant articles and keep them on the site longer. “We definitely think about recirculation as a key metric across all our networks and as a way of understanding our users getting a lot of value out of this,” the head of Vox Media’s CMS, Mandy Brown, told Nieman Lab.

Recirculate! Vox Media’s new structure for story packages gives readers context — and helps them stick around https://t.co/EvNaFN278X

— Nieman Lab (@NiemanLab) March 27, 2018

What about time per user? In a new set of recommended KPIs, or key performance indicators, for public media, time per user (or sessions per user, if time can’t be measured accurately) is offered as a key measure of engagement. The goal of audience engagement is to “encourage affinity, loyalty membership and advocacy,” write Steve Mulder of NPR and Mark Fuerst of Public Media Futures Forums in a piece on Current. Across websites, podcasts, streaming video and mobile apps, time per user could be a consistent starting point to measure success.

Yet there are important limits to web metrics when it comes to engagement. Most important, they only measure the activity of journalists indirectly, through content. They don’t directly measure what journalists do to engage with readers and communities. One KPI that missing from the public media recommendations, for example: How often organizations engage with their audiences, a suggestion made by The Coral Project on Twitter.

These are good – but we do wish that the 'Engage with our Audiences' KPIs contained at least one KPI around how often the orgs (and their journalists) engage with their audiences https://t.co/10OckMSGWh

— The Coral Project (@coralproject) March 27, 2018

Engagement Metrics for Real People

Engagement metrics need to account for the increasingly “real people” aspect of engagement work. Community and engagement teams now find themselves managing and scaling relationships with individual users. Rather than an aggregate audience and reach on social media, publishers have print subscribers, members of Facebook group, sources and email newsletter readers. Editorial engagement can even be the cornerstone of an audience revenue program. Editorial engagement, “builds the practice of bringing readers’ concerns deeper within the [news] organization,” Emily Goligoski and Elizabeth Hanson wrote in a report for the Tow Center earlier this year.

This kind of engagement work with real people needs metrics that measure the direct work of journalists, not just the indirect effect, and the quality of engagement, not just the volume.

Take Facebook groups for example. With Facebook pages getting less attention from the News Feed algorithm, groups are a way for publishers to remain engaged with users. The Dallas Morning News invites its subscribers to join a private Facebook group, one of more than a handful overseen by engagement editor Hannah Wise. Its success is a measure of subscribers’ loyalty to the News. “A group seemed like a low-cost way to test if our subscribers even wanted to talk to us since they have habits built around joining Facebook groups, liking content and reacting in the comments,” Wise told Solution Set. Wise also edits the News’s Hearken-powered project, Curious Texas.

https://twitter.com/hwise29/status/976982243896909825

Publishers from The Texas Tribune to The Atlantic are also measuring engagement with Facebook Groups. “We started looking at groups because it allows for more community and more semblances of privacy and sharing experiences,” The Atlantic’s Caitlin Frazier told Digiday. Newsrooms can use Facebook’s Group Insights dashboard to understand how members engage, see the most active group members, and examine post-by-post engagement.

Operating in a similar community-centric model, local newsletter publisher WhereBy.Us also measures engagement by looking the work of its journalists. Alongside traditional newsletter metrics like list size and open rate, they look at the number of responses to callouts and attendance at events. “I care most about metrics that indicate people have found value in what we’ve created and want to participate in our community,” growth editor Alexandra Smith told MediaShift in a recent interview.

Finally, one metric of editorial engagement is the impact on the journalism itself. People shared nearly 5,000 stories about maternal harm for ProPublica’s “Lost Mothers” investigation. And ProPublica tracked how they got to almost 5,000, including editorial engagement efforts that came with specific goals about increasing the representation of their story sample and led to stories like an advice piece with tips on improving maternal care from hundreds of women. At Reveal, after 2,000 listeners texted in questions about modern-day redlining, their reporters dug up the answers — and then they texted back.

Were you one of the 2,000 listeners who text us a question about modern-day redlining? @Aaron_Glantz @eman_thedataman @ByardDuncan have you covered.https://t.co/sqouUt4NTk

— Hannah Young (@HannahDotYoung) March 27, 2018

https://twitter.com/ByardDuncan/status/978714314717540352

Join MediaShift and experts from Content Insights, WhereBy.Us and the Dallas Morning News for “How to Get Better Engagement Metrics,” a free online panel on April 18. Reserve your seat now!

Jason Alcorn (@jasonalcorn) is the Metrics Editor for MediaShift. He will be moderating the free online panel “How to Get Better Engagement Metrics” with experts from Content Insights, WhereBy.Us and the Dallas Morning News on April 18. Reserve your seat here.

The post It’s Time For Better Engagement Metrics appeared first on MediaShift.

A group of filmmakers in Canada took their project one step further — by adding an interactive game element to their project.

“Thank You For Playing,” produced by the National Film Board of Canada, is part documentary film and part web game. The game simulates how casino games that reward users with positive reinforcement can lead to gambling addiction.

In Canada, revenue from gambling is used for infrastructure, health care, social services — and even preventing and treating gambling addiction. More than 35 percent of those revenues come from individuals with a gambling problem, according to the film.

It’s a paradox that the film’s director, Andréa Cohen-Boulakia, said she found fascinating. The goal of “Thank You For Playing,” which was released in December, is to bring awareness to the public health issue of gambling addiction. The filmmakers initially intended to focus on how the casino industry targets elderly people who often have a lot of free time, money to spend and are no longer active in society.

But after spending months traveling throughout towns and provinces across Canada to do research and interview prospective characters, Cohen-Boulakia found a more compelling story: the risk of gambling addiction as a result of being in a vulnerable emotional state. She saw that, as with any vice, some individuals are more prone to addiction than others. For most gambling addicts, the addiction is the outcome — not the original source of an individual’s problems.

“People talk about this being an emotional disease,” she said. “When you’re in a place where you’re emotionally wounded, you’re much more vulnerable. That’s what this is about.”

The Interactive Game 

The film opens up with a digital version of the shell game: the viewer, now the player, is presented with three icons. The icons are quickly shuffled and the film’s narrator directs the player to watch closely in order to uncover the icon that’s in the shape of a heart.

As the game continues, there are more icons are they are shuffled faster as the game becomes more challenging.

“Now you think you’re in control,” the narrator says. “But the game is programmed to let you win just often enough to condition your behavior. What is happening is called positive reinforcement.”

The viewer can then choose to watch one of three stories, each about a different subject who is recovering from a gambling addiction. Those characters, including one subject whose three-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with leukemia, explain how they saw gambling as an escape from their personal problems. The chapters of the film are interspersed between more opportunities to play the shell game, which continues to increase in difficulty.

The slot machine-like game allows the viewer, who has now become the player, to witness firsthand the adrenaline rush and excitement that come with winning a game — as well as the desire to keep playing. That’s an especially important component to include when the three subjects of the film cannot touch a machine themselves.

Andréa Cohen-Boulakia

Merging the interactive game with the documentary film scenes proved challenging and took more than one try to get right. Cohen-Boulakia described the two pieces as different “stories.”

“We wanted it to be interesting and enriching,” she said. “How can both formats, really different formats, mix together in order to give the audience a better understanding of the issue?”

Both the game and the film had the same goal — to educate. The goal was to have the game not match the experience of the characters in the film, but to create a new parallel and connecting experience. That required a team effort between the programmers and the producers, and it’s the part of the whole project that took the longest to complete, Cohen-Boulakia said.

The Film’s Impact

Cohen-Boulakia said as an educational tool, she hopes the film will bring more awareness about addiction and lead to more open discussions about what leads someone to go down that path.

Ideally, the risk and reward aspect of playing the game can offer insight into how individual might feel while gambling. Knowing early on that someone is susceptible to addiction might prevent the kind of dramatic outcomes in which people later find themselves when they are struggling with addiction. Cohen-Boulakia had even heard stories of addicts committing suicide. 

She said schools can have stronger prevention programs and hopes even kids will watch the film and begin to think about the issue.

“I hope people will be able to look in and ask themselves if they are prone to be dependent or not,” she said. “I hope people will talk more about it.”

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor of MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post How Canadian Filmmakers Combined a Film + Game to Combat Gambling Addiction appeared first on MediaShift.

Twitter has signaled its intention to focus on video as a key platform feature for 2018, and some publishers have already been noticing the effects.

Last year, Twitter’s announcement that it would be partnering with a string of media companies to provide round-the-clock video content for the platform was met with some skepticism.

Was Twitter trying too hard to muscle in on a social video space that was already saturated and showing unpredictable returns? Video on Twitter was largely known for Vine, the since-shuttered service that allowed six-second looped clips, and Periscope, a live-streaming channel that faced plenty of competition of its own.

When we previously outlined four ways that publishers used the medium in mid-2016, there was a feeling that Twitter video could only every really be thought of as a promotional or extremely short clip service.

In 2018, Twitter’s video plans look a little more concrete.

What’s changed for Twitter video?

Since the partnership announcement (which was followed later in 2017 by an announcement of even more partners), there have been a few changes in Twitter’s approach to video, some of which seem to have managed to increase use of, and engagement with, the medium. With these media partnerships and increasing numbers of key live events, Twitter appears to be stepping enthusiastically into live video broadcasting, a space where Facebook has recently ended its payments to publishers..

Twitter is also reportedly working on a new feature design to reduce the number of steps users have to take to share video on the platform, while executives have signaled that video will be an important keystone of the company’s ambitions in 2018.

Back in December, a new public metric called view counts was added to Twitter videos for the first time, leading to an increased standardization among other social video formats on different platforms. Twitter’s ‘total video view’ metric is calculated by the sum of “any views which are at least 50 percent in-view for 2 seconds.” Under this measurement system, at least half of video has to be visible and playing on a user’s screen for at least two seconds to count as a view.

There are some signals that user behavior around video on Twitter is also starting to change. Last month, several publishers, including Bauer Media and CNBC, told Digiday that they had seen significant increases in video views on Twitter recently.

One of the elements that publishers have to deal with on Twitter is that the platform has not traditionally been known as a referral powerhouse like Google or Facebook. Content on Twitter has to be able to work alone natively. Still, some publishers have been noticing the increased attention from followers. According to Digiday:

“Lifestyle publisher Stylist saw a 500 percent increase in its Twitter video views as a result of dedicating more resources to Twitter. Men’s interest site Joe Media saw a 20 percent increase in video views over the last four months to 6.2 million. A source familiar with the matter said that over the last year, Twitter has had a “significant” increase in the number of video views on the platform compared to the previous year.”

What are the biggest videos on Twitter?

So how have publishers been using video on Twitter in recent months? Looking in our analytics tool Spike, the most popular videos on Twitter (ranked by total retweets and likes) in the last 30 days from influential accounts are largely made up of viral clips, fan-focused content and videos posted from celebrity and public figures’ accounts.

For the publishers that do appear among the top videos however, certain themes are evident. News videos are extremely popular, which is not all that surprising given the popularity of news-focussed content on timelines generally.

Some of the new ways that publishers appear to be using video include standard TV-news repackages, as well as more recognizable social video formats. A strong current affairs theme runs through many. One of the most retweeted and liked videos of the last 30 days was a clip of U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s lackluster 60 Minutes interview, repackaged and posted by the news site Axios.

Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos struggles to answer fairly basic questions on school performance on 60 Minutes pic.twitter.com/lFVq3USwUW

— Axios (@axios) March 12, 2018

Another popular clip in the last month was a video posted by ABC News of a parent of one of the victims of the Parkland High School shooting criticizing the NRA. Both of these clips demonstrate strong news value, but do not differ significantly from the original made-for-TV broadcasts.

Father of Parkland victim slams NRA videos:

"If this was put out by a terrorist organization, we would be raising the terror threat level in this country. Why are we letting this lobby have anything to do with DC? I don't understand it!" https://t.co/9eh7udBMsx pic.twitter.com/FZeTqvTRmK

— ABC News (@ABC) March 7, 2018

In this way, Twitter videos may differ from Facebook video, which has placed an emphasis on differentiating itself as a unique format. Instead, audiences may see Twitter as a place where they can ‘see for themselves’ a video clip or footage that is the focus of news reports elsewhere. This is certainly a notion that Twitter itself looks to pursue, frequently touting its potential as a breaking news and live events platform.

In terms of volume of video content, there is a remarkable variance is overall posting habits from different publishers. This chart, compiled using NewsWhip Spike, shows the number of videos posted by ten selected TV news publishers in the U.K. and U.S. over seven days, from March 7 to 14, 2018.

This does not include retweets, therefore giving a clear picture of the amount of original video uploads that various networks are distributing through Twitter.

Fox News is the leading poster, with 701 videos over seven days, or an average of around 100 per day, from just one Twitter account. Other networks such as CBS and ABC also post video frequently, while BBC News posted just 28 videos in the same time period.

The vast variance is more apparent than on Facebook, and perhaps points to different experiences and strategies being pursued by the social media teams.

Twitter has some characteristics that have the power to make it a unique proposition in social video publishing. How exactly publishers decide to use the feature may change throughout this year, as the platform attempts to grow its share of the online video attention space.

In addition to audience engagement and uptake however, one question that will certainly be on publishers’ minds will certainly be: where do we make money from this?

Liam Corcoran writes about digital journalism and media trends, metrics, and more for the NewsWhip blog.

The post How Publishers Are Learning to Embrace Twitter Video appeared first on MediaShift.

Panel Title: How to Get Better Engagement Metrics

Moderator: Jason Alcorn, MediaShift
Panelists: Hannah Wise, Dallas Morning News; Alexandra Smith, WhereBy.Us; Christopher Pramstaller, Süddeutsche Zeitung

Engagement is so much more than Facebook reach. For publishers who want to cultivate a direct relationship with readers, it’s the top of the customer funnel. And how you define and measure engagement in your newsroom matters directly to whether you’ll be leading the industry or lagging behind.

This live online panel will include a discussion with publishers who are at the forefront of using engagement metrics to build a direct relationship with readers, improve the quality of their journalism and drive revenue for their businesses.

This free online panel is sponsored by Content Insights. Content Insights is a robust, powerful and extremely user-friendly editorial intelligence tool, turning Big Data into easy reading. Being tailor-made for editors by editors, Content Insights helps journalists understand what drives audience behavior in a really simple and comprehensible way. By replacing inadequate metrics like page-views, scroll-depth and sessions with Article reads, Read-depth and Readership and more, Content Insights provides an uniquely editorial take on how content success should be evaluated. All attendee emails will be shared with the webinar sponsor.

Handouts:

– Presentations will be available to participants.

Who should attend:

Journalists, editors, growth managers, social media editors, marketers, publishers, non-profits, and content creators interested in learning about engagement metrics.

Date and Time: April  18, 2018, 10 am PT / 1 pm ET

Free!

Register now for the online panel!

Note: If you can’t attend the live session, you can still register and see the archived video of the panel. Free registration for BigMarker is required.

About the Moderator:

Jason Alcorn is the metrics and impact editor at MediaShift. As a consultant he advises news organizations on business strategy and leadership and works with funders to develop program strategies. He also facilitates the Institute for Nonprofit News Emerging Leaders Council. Jason lives in Washington, D.C., with his family. You can follow Jason on Twitter at @jasonalcorn.

About the Panelists:

Hannah Wise is the Engagement Editor at the Dallas Morning News. She oversees the newsroom’s social media strategy and seeks ways to cultivate conversation around the News’ journalism. She edits The News’ Hearken-powered project, Curious Texas, where readers ask questions and journalists track down answers. Hannah is the Online News Association Dallas-Fort Worth chapter co-founder and president. She is the stitching maven behind behind the viral Instagram account @sewmanycomments where she doesn’t read the comments, but sews them.

Alexandra Smith recently became the growth editor for the digital media and tech startup WhereBy.Us. Before that, she led the audience engagement team at the Fort Collins Coloradoan. She started her journalism career seven years ago at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey after graduating from Rutgers University. Alexandra is most passionate about connecting local news to the community its meant to serve. When not ruminating on engagement strategies, you can find her learning to love all that living in Colorado has to offer.

Christopher Pramstaller works as an analyst and audience editor at Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s biggest quality newspaper. He has a background as a journalist and editor and has worked with editorial data for several years. Nowadays he tries to enable the editorial staff to be data-informed in a meaningful way – live and based on longer time frames.

The post DigitalEd Panel: How to Get Better Engagement Metrics appeared first on MediaShift.

Less than a year after closing its daily print edition to go all-digital, Brazil’s Gazeta do Povo has made major strides in its efforts to track the impact of its journalism on a societal level.

With ICFJ Knight Fellow Pedro Burgos’ help, Gazeta compiled and released its first impact report earlier this year to show readers the results of its work with Impacto, the impact-tracking tool Burgos developed with support from Google News Lab before starting his fellowship.

By compiling reports like this, Gazeta is able to show subscribers that its work is producing positive change in society — and that its journalism is worth paying for. And it gives digital-first newsrooms a more accurate, meaningful way to measure success than counting clicks.

But what does “impact” look like? For Gazeta, impact often looks like BRL16.4 million being returned to public coffers after Gazeta’s investigations uncovered irregular contracts made by the Federal University of Paraná. Impact can be as small as a reader telling the news outlet that its reporting has made a difference in his or her life, as well.

As an ICFJ Knight Fellow, Burgos is developing Impacto so it can be adopted by more newsrooms in Latin America and beyond. He is also building a coalition of Impacto media partners with continuing support from Google News Lab; Gazeta is one of the founding coalition members.

IJNet spoke with Leonardo Mendes Jr., Gazeta’s editorial director, to find out more about how the newsroom transitioned to an impact-tracking mindset — and what other newsrooms can learn from their efforts:

Tell us a bit about why Gazeta first decided to partner with Pedro and begin using Impacto. What changes took place after you started using Impacto in the newsroom?

Gazeta do Povo changed its business model last year. We shut down our daily print edition and we put all our energy into the digital product and the subscription model. But it has always been clear to us that people will pay for content if they see a single value in it. And Impacto is a tool created to show the unique value of journalism. It is a tool that shows subscribers how their subscriptions are supporting journalism that changes the world.

The newsroom quickly adopted Impacto as a working tool. Whenever a reporter or editor sees that there was a repercussion from one of their stories, they tell colleagues: “That is impact” — and then someone registers the impact.

Was there anything that surprised you from using Impacto to keep track of Gazeta’s impact?

We’ve always been a local media organization. With Impacto, we began to perceive and register how our content feeds the debate on national issues such as politics, economy, education and ideology.

What advice would you give to fellow journalists/newsrooms who want to get better at tracking their impact?

The key is to engage the team permanently. The team must see it as fundamental to the strengthening of high-quality journalism. Whenever engagement was high, impact records were frequent and significant. When engagement is low, we do not take full advantage of the tool.

What do you hope people will learn by reading the Impact Report?

How journalism can impact society in different ways. For some people, journalism plays its role only if it improves the use of public resources or overthrows bad government. Of course, both these things are very important. But journalism can do more. Journalism can help to teach a class how to live with someone different. Journalism can make the world better by telling inspiring stories. Journalism can improve a reader’s day simply because it made him happier or more motivated.

Read more about Impacto

Impacto was developed by Pedro Burgos, a Brazilian journalist and developer based in Sao Paulo. As an ICFJ Knight Fellow, Burgos is continuing to develop tools that help newsrooms measure the impact of their journalism in society. Impacto, which has the support of Google News Lab in Brazil, is already being tested in five important media companies — Folha de S. Paulo, Gazeta do Povo, Veja, Nexo and Nova Escola — and will be expanding to other countries this year.

Sam Berkhead is IJNet’s manager.

The post How A Local Newsroom In Brazil Learned To Track Its Impact appeared first on MediaShift.