Dorothy Hernandez (@dorothy_lynn_h), a volunteer with the ONA Resource Team, compiled these key moments from the ONA20 session on Oct. 7, 2020. To view a recording of the session, register for on-demand access to the ONA20 archive. Session participants included:
- Adrienne Shih, Audience Engagement Editor, Los Angeles Times
- Sarah Zimmerman, Deputy Digital and Audience Engagement Editor, Crain’s Chicago Business
- Mike Denison, Audience Engagement Editor, Science News
- Moderator: Liz Worthington, Director of Metrics for News, American Press Institute
5 key takeaways:
- The session’s guiding questions: How does your newsroom think about analytics? What are the metrics that matter most? (Spoiler: Pageviews don’t tell the whole story.).
- How panelists use analytics to make decisions:
-
- At the LA Times, they’re looking at converter visit data that can help inform journalists what resonates with readers and then use that information to drive decisions on how to leverage resources in covering specific stories.
- At Science News, they’re looking at what converts people and what stories are most likely to end with a donation, subscription or newsletter signup. Then that helps them to decide how to deploy resources in a small newsroom.
- At Crain’s, hardwalling has paid off:
-
- At the beginning of the pandemic, Crain’s was still just looking at pageviews. The pandemic took away all of the publication’s advertising, so it needed a new revenue model. Now was the time to do aggressive hardwalling and being strategic about what to offer for free. It worked: They saw orders soar at the height of the pandemic when people were looking for information.
- Something they’ve seen: The content that subscribers like is also the same type of content that is converting new people to pull out their wallets and actually subscribe.
- Not all audiences are equal: Both Sarah Zimmerman/Crain’s Chicago Business and Mike Denison/Science News talked about their respective pubs’ audiences and the gaps between what subscribers like versus casual readers. “We are looking at what’s more popular with our most loyal readers and people that are coming to the site all the time versus casual first time readers. Because both of those audiences are useful for different things.” — Mike
- Advice for newsrooms?
- Sarah: Look at trends and really focus on metrics that show long-term decision making and behaviors.
- Mike: Be strategic about presenting numbers to higher-ups because people will think the answer is to make the number bigger, which isn’t helpful.
- Adrienne: The bottom line is, it’s not always a strict science, there’s no exact formula for doing x + y = z (just because a certain story did well before doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily happen again).
Memorable/tweetable quotes:
- “(The digest) was a response to a climate in which we were producing so much information that people wanted, and it did have high public service value. But we do have to operate as a business still. So we made select offerings free, including the digest (which was framed as a one-stop shop for news and resources) as well as the daily newsletters.” —Matt Ballinger, deputy editor of the LA Times, shared by Adrienne Shih (take time to select a couple of pieces that have a high public service value that you can provide your readers)
- “Direct person correspondence with readers has been a big component of the engagement (for the newsletter).
- We’ve replied to more than 1,000 reader emails personally and answered many others in the newsletters, using the regular ‘your questions answered’ section at the bottom of most editions.” —Sam Schulz, LA Times newsletter strategy editor, shared by Adrienne Shih
- “Even though subscribers are only 5% of our audience basically they’re the most important audience and metric we have because these are the people that are paying us to subscribe … the content that engages subscribers is very closely correlated to that, that actually brings in new subscribers and I don’t think pageviews would capture that.” —Sarah Zimmerman
Links to additional resources
- Sample engagement plan — living documents to organize thoughts, ideas and digital assets like photos or videos and social copy and share lines for a story