As communities grow, audiences change and coverage needs evolve, can journalists make empirical choices about what to cover and how to cover it? That was a question 10 years ago when I came to the American Press Institute in June 2014 to help launch the growth of Metrics for News, API’s content strategy analytics tool that helps publishers understand what, why and how audiences engage with their journalism. A decade later, MFN is not only answering that question but guiding news organizations to:
- Launch newsrooms to serve new audiences
- Start specialized newsletters for multilingual audiences
- Change beats to better engage younger audiences
- Experiment with social platforms to better reach key audiences, just to name a few.
“Metrics for News is an invaluable part of our toolkit,” said Elizabeth Couch, director of audience engagement for Crain Communications’ City Brands. “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.”
Metrics for News was built to help solve the problem of bad analytics. Conventional web analytics were never created for journalists. Metrics for News adds journalistic context to audience data to inform editorial strategies. When a newsroom starts using Metrics for News to better understand its competitive advantage in engaging its community, it also unlocks coaching from API’s product, data and revenue experts and joins a community of news leaders to share lessons, obstacles and wins from their data journeys. It’s helped our partner newsrooms message how to use audience data to their staffs, advance data literacy across teams and manage major data migrations, like that of GA4.
With dashboards designed for different newsroom roles, audience analytics are accessible at every level in the newsroom.
“This is the tool that has the most success for us in changing reporter behavior,” said Margaret Kenny, managing editor of the Buffalo News. The Buffalo News is one of the newsrooms I’ve worked with the longest in my time at API. They adopted Metrics for News in 2017 and have used it to change story formats, launch new beats and track the impact of their work on building new audiences and earning subscriptions. It’s given reporters confidence to experiment with coverage and it’s given editors actionable insights that inform content strategy and time management. One example was cutting back on daily stories to make more time for enterprise coverage, a strategy that empowered reporters and increased audience engagement by nearly 20% in a year.
MFN data not only highlights what works with your audiences but helps identify what to stop doing. It’s an effective strategy to prioritize work and enables our partner newsrooms to use data to inform their decisions, boost subscriptions, improve audience engagement and reignite reporter morale.
“Metrics For News let us look at what we were doing and how we were doing it in new ways,” said Erica Smith, the managing editor for digital at Times Union who used MFN in two newsrooms. “It’s because of those perspectives that we were able to spot problem areas and opportunities — digging deeper to figure out what we were doing and why; what we should stop doing; and what we could do better.”
It’s hard to believe Metrics for News is 10 years old, and even harder for me to believe how fast those years flew by! My CRM tool tells me I’ve interacted with more than 800 publishers worldwide and worked directly with 400 of them — and that’s just me. Even more have been supported by the larger API team, audience strategists and engineers that have supported MFN partner newsrooms over the years. I’m proud of the newsrooms that have included API’s tools, resources and coaching in their editorial and audience strategies. The impact Metrics for News has brought to these newsrooms and their communities over the past decade continues to build as teams, coverage and communities change.
The technology was also spun into another API tool built to help make source tracking easier. Source Matters, which was named as Best New Digital Product by INMA in 2022, helps news organizations automate source tracking to more fully and fairly represent the communities they serve and center community voices in their coverage.
What’s next for Metrics for News? Our team has been working tirelessly to upgrade our software and build new features that improve performance and enhance our abilities to use AI to track topics and trends at the reporter, team and newsroom level. If you’re at ONA, please stop by Booth 303 or sign up here to meet with the Product Strategy team.
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