Metrics for News

Metrics for News

A powerful analytics tool that helps news leaders make informed editorial decisions

Metrics for News Dashboard

Why Metrics for News?

Metrics for News aligns journalism metrics with your editorial values and business model. This strategic tool complements real-time analytics by identifying patterns across all your data sources and helps news leaders find places to better align everyday coverage to longer-term audience engagement goals.

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Engagement scores

Blends multiple metrics into one number to offer a simple yet comprehensive view

Metrics for News: Engagement scores

Artificial intelligence

Identifies actionable patterns by categorizing content

Metrics for News: Artificial intelligence

Newsroom priorities

Evaluates content against larger strategic organizational goals

Metrics for News: Manage newsroom priorities
Metrics for News: Newsroom priorities

Understand reader engagement

Learn how and why readers engage with each author or team’s content

Access custom funnel analytics

Metrics for News: Understand reader engagement

Track journalism qualities

Spot subscriber-converting stories, topics and formats that build loyalty

Identify what types of journalism to do more, do less or do differently

Metrics for News: Track journalism qualities

Segment key audiences

Segment audiences by location, age group and more

Tailor analytics dashboards for reporters, editors and other roles in your news organization

Metrics for News: Segment key audiences

“Metrics for News is an invaluable part of our toolkit. It organizes our data, our journalism and our audience in ways that make actionable insights almost impossible to miss. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine crafting or executing a newsroom strategy without it.”

Crain Communications' City Brands

“While we have several data sources, Metrics for News offers the context needed to analyze our efforts to best serve our communities. It blends the data so editors can make strategic decisions for better coverage and engagement. The dashboard also serves as a learning tool for our journalists to better understand how their work contributes to newsroom goals.”

Forum Communications Company

This is the tool that has the most success for us in changing reporter behavior.

Margaret Kenny, Managing editor of the Buffalo News

“Metrics for News is an invaluable part of our toolkit… It organizes our data, our journalism and our audience in ways that make actionable insights almost impossible to miss. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine crafting or executing a newsroom strategy without it.”

Elizabeth Couch, Director of audience engagement for Crain Communications’ City Brands

Case studies & Resources

How to use analytics to identify and build a popular new beat

A local news publisher in Norfolk, VA, has been using data to drive editorial decisions — a journey closely tied to its digital transition since [...]

From print-first to audience-first: Using analytics to change the newsroom mindset

For the past two years, the Virginian Pilot’s newsroom goals have not included a print component — a huge shift in its 154-year history. “Our [...]

Want to find time for more enterprise reporting? Dive into analytics.

Analytics don’t have to clash with journalistic values. Here’s how one team of reporters has used analytics to reinforce its mission. When journalists think of [...]

Using LinkedIn to reach and engage younger audiences

A recent cohort hosted by Metrics for News – Reaching New Audiences – brought together publishers from around the world to look at data-driven strategies to reach new audiences. [...]

Moving on from the way it’s always been done

A recent cohort hosted by Metrics for News – Reaching New Audiences – brought together publishers from around the world to look at data-driven strategies to reach new audiences. [...]

How metrics & surveys can help you better understand & serve your community

A recent cohort hosted by Metrics for News – Reaching New Audiences – brought together publishers from around the world to look at data-driven strategies to reach new audiences. [...]

Helpful tips: Messaging metrics in the newsroom

A weekly newsletter. Open office hours. One-on-one chats. These are just some ideas to consider if you want to get more people talking about metrics [...]

Explore your data: Make the most of custom reports

Custom reports enable you to easily access and organize your raw data to more deeply explore your data and answer important audience questions. A core [...]

How Metrics for News helped Crain Communications launch a newsroom in Michigan

By sending data from their targeted audiences in Adobe Analytics into MFN, Crain was able to more clearly understand what topics, categories, and even story types were engaging readers in key parts of their coverage area.

Marking a decade of Metrics for News

Liz Worthington has interacted with more than 800 publishers worldwide and worked directly with 400 of them over the past 10 years.

Access actionable, accessible newsroom data with Metrics for News

All news outlets have stories that are central to the mission of their work, but aren’t necessarily the most popular with readers. Data gathered from tools like MFN can help find creative ways to maintain this important coverage in a way that resonates with the audience.

Frequently asked questions

General

Metrics for News is a strategic tool that complements real-time analytics. By pulling in data from a multitude of sources, Metrics for News can identify overarching patterns among audience behavior across all your data sources that individual analytics tools can’t do on their own.

We think there’s no single metric that tells the whole story, so we blend several key metrics (including pageviews, time on page, social and mobile data) into a single Engagement Score. This gives you a metric that is both comprehensive and simple. Each partner can use default scores we’ve tested with many markets or can customize different Engagement Scores that reflect their priorities. If you find too many metrics can paralyze decision making, blended scores will help you simplify your data to answer important audience questions.

Metrics for News is highly customizable and compatible with news organizations of different sizes and any CMS. We’ve worked with small community newsrooms and major metropolitan ones, as well as corporate chains.

Ideally everyone in the newsroom — from reporters and editors to upper-level managers — as well as those on the business side who need data about audience reach and consumer revenue. The dashboards can be filtered to show you what you care about most, whether you’re looking at a single story, an overall beat, or the newsroom as a whole.

Metrics for News policy pages: Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Compatibility

Metrics for News can integrate with Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics (Omniture), your own data warehouse or DMP, Chartbeat, Facebook and X, as well as commenting platforms. And we can import your content through RSS feeds, or custom feeds or files you may provide.

Metrics for News can work with any CMS, because it exists outside of your systems as a web-based application.

Logistics

There are multiple payment tiers available, depending on which services you’d like to use. All are affordable, compared with other analytics tools — the American Press Institute wants to provide this service as widely and cheaply as possible for the benefit of the news industry. If cost is a barrier for your news organization, we also may have grant-funded subsidies at times to help cover some of the costs. Contact us for pricing information tailored to your organization.

Unfortunately, we can’t offer free trials due to the amount of work it takes to set up and customize the application for each news organization. But we do offer demos — fill out this form to learn about the next demo.

Some of these journalistic characteristics can be determined based on how your stories are categorized in your CMS. We can also categorize topics using artificial intelligence and write custom rules.

While you could use Metrics for News with completely automated categorization, you have the option to manually categorize certain subjective story types, such as those that elicit emotional reactions, those with practical relevance, the originality of your story ideas, etc.

Request a demo

Want to see Metrics for News dashboards in action and learn how it can help your organization make data-informed decisions? Sign up for updates about upcoming demos. Email questions to the team at support@metricsfornews.com.