How to get reporters to use data regularly

How do your reporters decide what they are going to cover?

In the past, when the data that we have today didn’t exist, it often was an editor and reporter-led decision, taking into account knowledge of the market, reader interests, surveys and focus groups.

I actually think much of that should still be a factor in deciding what a media company should cover. It’s not like just because tools like Parse.ly and Marfeel are here today that a reporter’s knowledge of their community and useful surveys, shouldn’t still be used. Those things should. They should be part of the coverage puzzle.

Here are a few ways to think about using data and other tools to help influence what you cover and how.

1. Start with having basic data for reporters

At a very simple level, every person in your company who touches content should have access to at least Google Analytics so they can understand the performance of their stories.

There are clearly better tools for reporters to understand their metrics like Parse.ly, Marfeel and Chartbeat. They all do different but similar things but one of their core jobs is to guide newsrooms to make decisions on what readers want more of.

(Note: I’m happy to walk anyone through our recommendations on the best analytics tool for your newsroom.)

When I led content at GateHouse Media, we went all in on Parse.ly and this case study was developed on how we got reporters using the tool to guide their coverage. It’s still pretty relevant today.

So Step 1 is getting everyone access to whatever tools you have or can afford.

2. Let the data drive your overall topics

Decide how you are going to use the tool. At a high level, the tools can guide the overall topics that you cover. This can be incredibly helpful for any media company, but especially magazines that are niche focused as it can help you uncover topics that you may not be covering in depth today. Let that data influence the topics that reporters would prioritize.

As each story is created, evaluate how that story performed. The tools mentioned above can help you discover how those stories performed by platform, so if your business is going all in on email, you’d really want to make coverage decisions based on how readers are reacting to content on that platform, opposed to just looking at the page views across everything.

This strategy really comes alive when you’re able to find second day stories from the data or discover a topic that’s a part of a reporter’s beat that should become a much larger focus.

For example, I’ve been working with a reporter who covers county government for a daily newspaper and we’ve been able to establish that anything around housing is a hit with readers and that’s not always about new housing developments. For example, this story she wrote this week on a housing roundtable was her highest performing post this week. We discussed what more we could do from this story.

3. Build a dashboard and expectations

Reviewing data is great but it’s critical that metric goals are created and then measured through these analytic tools.

Ensuring that each reporter has their own dashboard (those tools above provide that), someone in a leadership role is going over those numbers with reporters regularly, you’re discussing coverage plans based on the data and you have goals per each reporter, is all very important.

An important step to take is creating averages by metric for a reporter to shoot for: Users, sessions, views, time on story, conversions (look at these in your most important distribution channels). That can give you a baseline on how to create goals.

Being able to review those goals and grow them over time is where we all want to be but having a strategy, the dashboard and a process for review, is what makes this all come to life.

Work with us

We’d love to help you create your data strategy. Connect with me at
david@davidarkinconsulting.com