Food for thought. When we provide our predictive recommendations for what articles to promote on the front page of a news media destination, where and for how long – I tend to paint a picture of a Wall Street trading floor for those in the newsroom still skeptical about data as a valid input and proper foundation for decision support.

I am most sure none of us could imagine walking into the trading floor of Deutsche Bank and see 50 traders engaged in the market, based on experience, intuition and an idea of what is important only. Every single one of them will have a Bloomberg terminal or similar data support, some of their decisions will certainly be automated, but a lot will be human driven decisions assisted by data.

Today, it is acceptable to walk into a newsroom, and have 50 producers and editors engaged in creating and promoting news of the moment, without any decision support platform at all. To me, asking for targets, whether in engagement, unique visitors, page views or more sophisticated metrics, seems almost unfair and to some degree unrealistic – if they are not armed with the proper backup and data driven decision support systems.

I am biased of course, but it comes from the heart.   I do truly believe that change is in the making and the future of media is bright.  Our vision of putting the visual revenue content recommendation platform in every newsroom is absolutely sane!

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)