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