A new tool developed by The Washington Post called BreakFast is helping the Post measure the speed of its breaking news email alerts against other news organizations. BreakFast monitors alerts from the Post and nine other news organizations and parses the alerts to determine if the topic is the same as previous alerts. BreakFast then […]

The Financial Times is trying to make its metrics more accessible to the newsroom with a tool called Lantern. The goal of Lantern is to help the newsroom understand metrics beyond just pageviews, giving them information such as average time on page, what type of device readers are on, retention rate and average scroll depth. […]

“Dark traffic” — referrals to a website from undetermined sources — is a growing concern for many publishers, but The Guardian developed an in-house analytics tool called Ophan to help make sense of dark traffic. Ophan measures reader behavior in real-time, and can infer the source of some dark traffic based on the referral patterns […]

Checking the news first thing in the morning is a habit for a lot of people, but a lot of news organizations aren’t posting stories until after many readers have already moved on with their days, Anjanette Delgado writes. When analyzing traffic at Gannett’s Salinas Californian newsroom, Delgado says they found stories were going up […]

BuzzFeed publisher Dao Nguyen wants to dispel the myth that data scientists determine what’s written at BuzzFeed. The reality is much more nuanced, Nguyen says, and BuzzFeed knows there are a lot of things that they can’t learn from data, including the qualitative reasons why a story resonated with people. Nguyen says: “I don’t think […]

Google Analytics is the source of lots of useful insights about how your audience is using your website, but Webcredible’s Mark Cunnah says there are some reports in Google Analytics you may not be using. Cunnah explains how to use Segments to break down your audience into useful groupings and how to use Events to […]

Many publishers are in the “awkward adolescent stages of data adoption,” Lucinda Southern writes, but because Financial Times has had a paywall since 2007, it’s had a head start. FT’s 30-person data team is focused on customer analytics and research, and chief data officer Tom Betts says the team helps make engagement a company-wide focus: […]

As many publishers are jumping into distributed strategies, they’re finding that measuring their audiences across different platforms isn’t simple, Lucia Moses writes. CNN’s Meredith Artley says they are somewhat at the mercy of the platform, which may choose to provide data once a day or even once a week: “All these platforms are a little […]

You might have heard: AOL is combining all of its publisher products into a single platform called One (Business Insider) But did you know: With the creation of its new platform One, AOL wants to show the publishers in its network that “it has solutions not only for advertisers … but specifically for the publisher […]

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 […]