growing your digital audience
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Growing Your Digital Audience The New York Times
How the Times is using data to inform our audience development while maintaining our editorial judgment
Ari Isaacman Astles | @Ari_NYT | ari@nytimes.com | October 2015 | Lesbians Who Tech NYC
How do you grow your digital audience?
You probably already know to…
Optimize for social.
Optimize your product and your
publication processes.
Measure
everything. Test everything. Learn constantly.
Keep it agile!
Optimize for mobile.
Optimize for search.
What’s missing from this slide?
Optimize for social.
Optimize your product and your publication and
distribution processes.
Measure
everything. Test everything. Learn constantly.
Optimize for mobile.
Optimize for search.
Editorial Judgment
How do you grow your digital audience, in a way that is informed by data, but
ruled by editorial judgment?
Create, communicate and use guiding principles
for data in your newsroom.
Guiding Principles:
1. Editorial judgment comes first
2. Context is critical
3. Don’t treat numbers like a scorecard
4. We are data-informed, but not data-driven; our mission of great journalism remains unchanged
How do these guiding principles work in real life?
Instead of reporters and editors asking,
“Did it get a lot of pageviews?”
We are discussing both editorial and audience goals
to enable a complex and nuanced discussion of
outcomes.
For a story about the culture at Amazon, we hoped to inspire an engaging discussion
among readers.
And we broke the record for the most comments ever on a Times story (5,858).
For the first Republican debate, we wanted to drive readers to our Slack-powered live chat.
We had one of our largest liveblog audiences ever.
When Nick Kristof and Adam Ellick traveled to Angola to tell the story of the world’s deadliest place for kids, we
wanted to over-index for readers in Angola.
We worked with a leading Portuguese news outlet to embed our video on their homepage, reaching a significantly higher
percentage of readers in Angola than usual.
PLAN with both audience and editorial goals in mind
DO Create your projects and
experiments, measuring along the way
ASSESS & LEARN from your outcomes, discussing both
audience and editorial goals and sharing these learnings across
teams
Plan, do, assess & learn
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