How Financial Times balances editorial instinct and analytics data

Speaking on a panel about metrics in the newsroom in Paris last week, Financial Times head of audience engagement Renée Kaplan explained the relationship between editorial instinct and analytics in newsroom decisions. Kaplan says FT relies on journalists’ instincts to decide what stories are covered, but metrics data is used later on in the process to optimize the stories. For example, Kaplan says data is used to determine how users will interact with a story: “You don’t necessarily want people on certain platforms to interact with stories in the same ways, maybe you want them to share an article, like it or click it.”

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