It’s a statement that is heard frequently at gathering of journalists:
“Today we have the tools to tell us immediately about the impact of our stories. The days when a journalist would file a story, go home relax and return to work the next day are over. Today the verdict is in immediately, via analytics.”
However, how reliable are those figures about the number of people reading our stories?
Not so good, asserts Tom Rosenstiel, Executive Director of the American Press Institute. Rosennstiel argues that hat the path toward sustainable journalism is being undermined by terrible data.
In a recent Brookings paper, titled “Solving journalism’s hidden problem: Terrible analytics”, Rosenstiel writes that the data currently used by the publishing world were designed for other purposes and offer little information that is useful to journalists or publishers. The industry, according to Rosenstiel, must learn how to create and utilize valuable data.
Rosenstiel and his team at API developed a new tagging system that allows publications to collect useful data by having editors identify stories by subject; story type; and an exhaustive list of other characteristics.
Some highlights of the Rosenstiel findings using new data models
Major enterprise pays - The single biggest change publishers can make is to produce more major enterprise journalism. Major enterprise stories scored 48 percent better than others in a measure of overall engagement. However, just one percent of all content produced is classified as such.
People like long stories - The conventional wisdom that writing for the web needs to be short and fast simply is not true. “Long form” stories, those averaging 1,200 words, drove 23 percent more engagement and lifted other metrics such as page views (up 11 percent), sharing (by 45 percent), and reading time (by 36 percent).
The power of photos, audio, and video - Stories presented with a photo scored 19 percent higher in engagement than stories without photos.
The full paper is available here:
http://www.brookings.edu/governance
