spark 2016: growing your digital audience
TRANSCRIPT
Growing Your Digital Audience
Ari Isaacman [email protected] Spark, by TrackmavenMay 2016
The New York Times
How the Times is using data to inform our audience developmentwhile maintaining our editorial judgment
How do you growyour 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 first2. Context is critical3. Don’t treat numbers like a scorecard4. 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 do good?”
We are designing experiments with
editorial and audience goals in mind.
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 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 new outlet to embed our video on their homepage, reaching a significantly higher percentage of readers in
Angola than usual.
PLAN experiments with both audience and editorial goals outlined
DO your 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