Om Malik and the good folks over at GigaOm are looking to hire a News Editor to manage the edit flow for their team. What caught my eye were the following bullets which list two important duties:

• Maintain the balance of news and long feature pieces on the sites;
• Regularly review the online stats and work to shift focus to increase traffic;

I am of course always on the lookout for new ways to describe the offering of the Visual Revenue platform and the content recommendations we provide for web front pages, mobile front pages and virtual front pages. The above two bullets certainly adds to my vocabulary – and the duties can undoubtedly be satisfied using our platform as suitable decision support.

However, when Editors are asked to maintain the balance of news on the front pages they manage, we see this executed as a very subjective process and content placement is almost entirely up to the individual editor in that moment. We rarely see these processes formulated in crisp editorial instructions for which a new editor can go execute while assuring he is within the editorial tone and general guidelines of the property he manage.

This is where algorithmic and generally Data Driven Editorial instructions really have the opportunity to add a lot of value – assuring that the editor-in-chief can set the tone and apply a set of guidelines that are always kept by his team of editors. Such as the following persistent editorial instructions (these are random examples from publishers on the Visual Revenue platform, which we apply before pushing recommendations):

• We must promote at least 60% local stories on the front page at any given point in time
• We must use a story with picture material for position 1, 2 and 3
• We cannot show content in the top carousel older than 16 hours
• We cannot have more than 3 stories from the entertainment category above the fold
• We cannot have a gallery in the hero spot
• We cannot use more than 30% AP stories

Data driven editorial instructions helps publishers stay in absolute control of their front page – and with that the promotional editorial tone. This conclusion is almost contradictory to the common belief of data doing nothing else but accelerate the drive towards the lowest common denominator, which is simply not the case.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)