19

Jul

By Dennis R. Mortensen
14 comments
Data Driven Online News Media Examples

I was reading an article in the New York Times, which suggest that work place burnout, starts at a younger age, in the world of online news media. I do not agree with the article’s main point, but I instantly fell in love with the authors examples of ruthless environments, a perverse opposite of the intent I guess. He assembles some of the pioneers in the marriage of Data and News Media.

Find below a pool of excerpts from the article:

  • The Christian Science Monitor now sends a daily e-mail message to its staff that lists the number of page views for each article on the paper’s Web site that day
  • Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles
  • The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all display a “most viewed” list on their home pages – (Me: Not overly data driven, but it still counts)

And the usual, and still lovable example, of the perceived ultimate journalistic sweatshop:

  • At Gawker Media’s offices in Manhattan, a flat-screen television mounted on the wall displays the 10 most-viewed articles across all Gawker’s Web sites. The author’s last name, along with the number of page views that hour and over all are prominently shown in real time on the screen, which Gawker has named the “big board.”

I personally think Gawker got it right for the most part, they should probably get slightly more sophisticated on their metrics (which they might well be internally), but the philosophy and thinking is well within my own comfort zone.

I recently commented about similar endeavors; Every news-writer has a Dashboard with Metrics determining his compensation and Analytics is building the Newsroom of the Future.

Picture: Gawker scoreboard for Reporters, which list most-viewed articles throughout the day. (Michael Appleton for The New York Times.)

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

  • Ray Shanklin

    Well the new modern era of Media. You put a picture in my head of competitve trader style writers boiler.

    I wonder if thats good or bad.

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Ray,

    Thanks for commenting. I am a strong believer in news media optimization not being about driving towards the lowest possible common denominator, and that better performance could as easily push relevance, as compared to the general idea of pushing everybody toward easy digestible celebrity news.

    And if we all started looking at content as products, trading might just sound like optimal market conditions – and not content production slavery.

    cheers
    d. :-)

  • http://www.emetrics.org Jim Sterne

    And in the newsroom after THAT, we correlate articles with readership from the audience our advertisers want: location, income, likes, dislikes, friends, subscriptions, credit score, Twitter followers, etc.. Then pay authors more when ad impressions increase for that type of advertiser. As an author, you could write a lot of celebrity trash for the diet soda, Motel-Six, weight-loss fad, sugar-coated-cereal, Tea Party, Greyhound Bus crowd or opt to write just a few, extended-vocabulary classical music reviews for Smart Car, iPad, grad school, NPR, home-owner, Lexus, garden party, Ritz Carlton readers. There’s revenue to be found, catering to every sector.

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Well put Jim.

    I am however quite confident, that we the readers, will end up consume more quality content than before. Sure, some of the sedative time spent on TV today, is going to end up on the web, as time spent on Lindsey Lohan articles.

    There is a good input on this here: http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/07/what-the-audience-wants-isnt-always-junk-journalism

    Cheers
    d. :-)

  • http://www.emerkirrane.com Emer Kirrane

    That’s interesting – I wonder if workplace burnout could be driven by the double-jobbing in promoting your own articles through social media endeavours to earn page views -> commission. Just….one…more…tweet… :)
    It seems to me that unweighted page views as an earner COULD drive unhealthy competition between colleagues if popular topics/popular “personalities” get better results – but perhaps that’s what the brave new world is all about and a lack of such incentives is just as unhealthy.

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Emer,

    In the scenario where everything stay constant, that to say, assuming we evolve into more data driven news media, we almost have to accept that we (the industry) will evolve the metrics upon which it is measured (to begin with, seeing the end of unweighted page views) .

    So I am either too optimistic OR positively awaiting the day where the Wall Street Journal post a Lindsey Lohan article on the primary Front Page. :-)

    Cheers
    d.

  • Mihaela Popa

    Hi Dennis,

    I wish I shared your optimism, but when currently, the third story on BBC Europe is “Parasailing donkey sparks probe”, I’m having doubts about the quality of journalism we’ll be seeing. BBC did away with an effective and elegant news format that had become their trademark, in favor of promoting the odd story on their front pages. Perhaps that’s what attracts the flighty reader, but that’s not what I’ve come to expect from the BBC.

    Cheers,
    Mihaela

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Miha,

    I agree that para-sailing donkey stories are not what we would instantly expect from the BBC – and they are certainly not providing any civic value in and by themselves.

    What comforts me, is the accepted idea, that we are in the midst of a news media evolution (revolution for some). And with that evolution in mind, I have come to expect and accept, that for me to get positive experiences, like the opportunity for an Ugandan student to post “live” to the BBC site in regards to recent bombings, I have to accept other experimental elements, the variants (and for you and I) irrelevant Donkey stories.

    I do not believe, it is possible to get one without the other. It is of course up to us, the readers, to assure that we end up with true civic value and not mindless entertainment (all the time).

    I am unsure how I ended up being an advocate for the News Media Industry – and perhaps I am not. I am, however, a strong advocate for data driven usage not being a news media illness.

    Cheers
    d. :-)

  • http://robinrowland.com Robin Rowland

    When I read this article, a vision popped into my head. All those now famous artists who couldn’t sell a thing while they were alive and now long after they are dead, make millions for the current owners of their pieces and keep Sothbeys and Christies in business with commissions.

    Unfortunately if there is a writer or multimedia web person doing that sort of work today, it wouldn’t survive the next server upgrade much less their deaths presumably in a few decades.

    This sweatshop mentality also prevents the good journalists from having the time to work on a story or multimedia presentation that takes time and effort and, if put up, succeeds in the long term but not instant page views.

    Just remember the agents who turned down J. K. Rowling and the 12 publishers who turned down Harry Potter. Or take Dune which was turned down by every major US publisher, until one small company that normally printed tech manuals took a risk. Dune is still a franchise 40 years later with books, movies and miniseries.

    Garbage in garbage out.

  • Sinjin Maloney

    Hi Dennis,

    Last time we spoke, it was in an Index Tools interview in Budapest! That was a while ago. Well, to your last comment, I wanted to add, I agree with your point on experimenting with how “news” (professional or vox populi) is published online. It is true that it is up to readers to filter what is important to them. Search engines will evolve and provide more contextually appropriate information to users (depending on their configured or behaviorally driven preferences). Tools like Yahoo Pipes and Google Reader will let users pull only the information they want to see. As these two things evolve together, it should make it easier to filter through a lot of the noise that one might not be interested in.

    I am all for being data driven. It’s what I advocate for all the time with my clients. I think the mistake I see a lot within organizations is that the management part of the organization–that part that makes these kinds of decisions noted in your article–do not consult with the strategic part of the organization first–the analysts (either in-house or via an agency). The analysts, at least the more strategically oriented ones ask questions like, What are your overall goals? What are your objectives? What are the requirements of the business? Of your journalists? How do those requirements overlap positively and negatively to achieve those goals and objectives? What strategies will best drive the business forward in a way that enables your journalists, and meets the business revenue needs of the organization? And what measures should be used to determine how you’re performing against those goals? Too often it is one person’s uninformed opinion (Jason Burby’s The Big Dog syndrome; Avinash Kaushik’s HiPPO). There’s no easy solution. But part of the solution, I should think is determining the value of those business vs. journalist requirements, and from that creating strategies that optimize the right combination of requirements, such that costs and revenue are optimal and sustain the business. Well, that would go a long way towards solving the problem. Part of it at least, I would hope.

    Last comment. NPR’s On The Media had an interesting program this last week on the newspaper industry. A lot of it ties in with the issues being discussed in your blog post above. You can see it here: http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2010/07/16.

    Hope all is well.

    Cheers–Sinjin

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Ha. Good to hear from you Sinjin. And all is VERY well.

    I could not agree more. It is difficult to negatively judge a writer for yet another story about donkeys (previous comment), when the overall objective and primary goals are not set, or perhaps just indicated as a want for more page views.

    n.b. Thanks for the “On The Media” link.

    d. :-)

  • http://techpad.co.uk TechPad

    That’s really interesting. I particularly like Gawker’s idea. On my work site we use a private forum for our news writers to share best practice and I’m hoping to integrate data on the performance of their content into this from the author dashboard your previous post inspired me to start creating. I’ve already reallocated some of my editorial budget to those writers whose work performs best based on initial results.

    On our sites (I work for a very large UK publisher), the writers just provide the words, and it’s the web producers or site editors who often have the most control over bounce rate and time on page metrics, which I tend to pay quite a bit of attention to, on top of page views. We want the news to drive clicks to other parts of the site and the readers to spend more than a few seconds reading.

    I’m providing reports for some of the producers/editors which show them which items they need to focus on optimising before their weekly newsletter goes out which are based on high traffic pages with high bounce rate and low time on page. Usually these things can be improved simply by adding links to related internal content and formatting the text better so it’s more readable.

  • http://visualrevenue.com/blog Dennis R. Mortensen

    Techpad,

    >>Author dashboard your previous post inspired me to start creating.

    That is really exciting! Please do email me a screen-shot at some point, I would love to see what you have done (in confidence of course). Even better, we should chat about optimization in News Media in general one day, should you have the time. AND if you are in NY on business, do pop by the office :-)

    Cheers
    d.

  • http://techpad.co.uk TechPad

    Thanks a lot, Dennis! Likewise, if you ever happen to be in England. I’ll drop you a line when I’ve finally got things looking half decent.

    Cheers,
    Matt