For news organizations, clicks are tracked closely. They generate advertising revenue and help newsrooms to better understand audience interests. But what motivates news users to click? The reasons are diverse and perhaps unexpected, according to a study forthcoming in the academic journal Journalism by Ph.D. candidate Tim Groot Kormelink and journalism studies professor Irene Costera […]

You might have heard: Facebook overestimated its average video viewing time metric by 60 percent to 80 percent for two years But did you know: After announcing earlier this fall that it had been overestimating video metrics, Facebook announced on Wednesday that it found more metrics errors in how it was calculating organic page reach, […]

“The results of [investigative] reporting do not come cheaply, but they are a bargain to society,” James T. Hamilton writes in his new book Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism, out this month from Harvard University Press. Through his research, Hamilton, the Hearst Professor of Journalism at Stanford University, finds that while investigative journalism […]

“The impact of nonprofit news is like any good story — if no one reads it or hears about it … your job is only halfway done,” the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s Lauren Fuhrmann and Mara Jezior write. To that end, the center publishes an annual report every November, which allows the communities it […]

You might have heard: Facebook overestimated its average video viewing time metric by 60 percent to 80 percent for two years But did you know: “Marketers who have been pouring huge sums into digital advertising are wrestling with several recent events that add to a troubling picture,” Suzanne Vranica and Mike Shields write. “Some are finding […]

If you’re heading to the Online News Association annual conference Sept. 15-17 in Denver, stop by the American Press Institute’s booth in the conference midway at the Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center. From 10 a.m.-2:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 15,  we’ll be giving away free flash drives pre-loaded with plenty of teaching resources […]

Melody Kramer brainstorms a list of 50 ways to think about your analytics, broken down by basic analytics such as pageviews, social media analytics, engagement, and audio/video. Some of Kramer’s ideas: Number of people who sign up for a newsletter, number of citations in other news articles, percentage of page viewed, number of new listeners/viewers […]

Clover Letter, a newsletter targeted to teenage girls, noted a somewhat unexpected challenge of email newsletters: After a strong start with 70 percent open rates, founders Casey Lewis and Liza Darwin found their open rates started to drop after they began including more GIFs and other images. But it wasn’t necessarily that fewer people were […]

Creating a successful metrics strategy comes down to one thing, Alexa Roman writes: Predicting how much money you’re going to make. Or if money isn’t the goal, replace “money” with your own currency of what matters most. Roman outlines five steps for executing a metrics strategy focused on money (or some other form of value) […]

Media organizations tended to give high priority to Brexit coverage early on, but Chartbeat’s data on the thousands of stories on Brexit shows that didn’t translate into attention from readers until much later on. And, as the story evolved, the way people discovered Brexit stories changed, too. Ahead of the announcement of the results on […]