We are excited to announce today a new cohort of newsrooms using Metrics for News, the American Press Institute’s analytics dashboard and content strategy program.
Metrics for News gives newsrooms powerful journalism analytics that go beyond traditional traffic metrics and offers unique tools to help grow audiences, deepen engagement and drive subscriptions. It’s a strategic tool built around newsroom priorities and designed so every user can see how their work contributes to larger organizational goals.
Thanks to a generous grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, nine newsrooms received subsidized access to API’s Metrics for News software and services. They are:
- Arizona Daily Star, a local newspaper in Tucson, Ariz.
- Bangor Daily News, a local newspaper in Bangor, Maine
- Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization covering education policy in seven cities, along with a national reporting team
- Connecticut Mirror, a nonprofit news organization covering Connecticut politics and policy
- GFR Media Communications, the largest news publisher in Puerto Rico
- KPBS, a public media organization in San Diego
- Lawrence Journal-World, a local newspaper in Lawrence, Kan.
- Trib Total Media, publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
- Vail Daily, a local newspaper in Vail, Colo.
In their applications, publishers identified reasons they wanted to bring Metrics for News to their newsrooms.
“Metrics for News has the potential to help us isolate what qualities, topics and story forms our users respond to most,” KPBS wrote in its application. “Finding out what engages an audience could provide important information on possibly realigning beats and formats that better engage users. We’d like to know what kind of content appeals to which demographic, thereby helping us with our sustainability strategies.”
For the Lawrence Journal-World, Metrics for News fills a gap in their current analytics.
“We recently launched a paymeter and are working to reach our monthly subscription goals,” wrote Director of Marketing Allison Wilson. “One area we are lacking is a way to track our audience segments in our audience funnel and their path to subscribe. We are focused on making data-driven decisions and we believe the Metrics for News tool would help us to meet our subscription goals to give our news organization a sustainable business model.”
These news organizations will join more than 80 others who have used Metrics for News for purposes including:
- Know what types of journalism users engage with and why
- Empower journalists to measure and improve their own performance
- Simplify analytics by blending key metrics into single Engagement Scores that reflect editorial values and business strategy
- Track different audience segments to learn what drives engagement, builds loyalty and triggers subscriptions,
- Learn what to do more of, do less of or do differently
We continually add new publishers to this program, so anyone who is interested can get in touch with us for a demo or more information.
As we bring on more newsrooms, we are also excited to announce the newest features of Metrics for News. Our platform went through an extensive redesign last year that incorporated feedback and user research from dozens of our partner newsrooms about what they need in an analytics tool. This informed some of the newest updates, including:
- Different dashboards for different user roles
- A focus on strategic priorities allowing publishers to surface the metrics that matter most to their editorial mission and business goals
- Audience segmentation to easily showcase what key audience groups publishers want to track and how they engage, build loyalty and drive subscriptions
- A Path to Conversion dashboard to show how varying levels of loyal users engage with your journalism and what triggers users to subscribe
- Automated tagging of content
- Automated insights to easily surface what works and what doesn’t
More than 40 newsrooms submitted applications to access this subsidy, which shows a real need for better analytics aimed at helping newsrooms answer important audience questions. The selected newsrooms have agreed to share their goals and what they learn along the way, which will be turned into public resources to benefit all newsrooms.
We also recently learned that Metrics for News is a finalist for this year’s Global Media Awards in the categories of “best use of new technology to generate revenue and engage” and “best use of data analytics.” We’re honored at the distinction and look forward to sharing this powerful tool with more publishers.
To learn more about Metrics for News and how it can help your newsroom, please visit metricsfornews.com or register to attend an open demo at 11 a.m. EST on Tuesday, March 19, with Katie Kutsko, API’s partner development manager.
To stay up to date on future announcements including other opportunities for subsidized access Metrics for News, sign up for API’s Need to Know Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @metricsfornews.
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