Metrics and the Mission

Audience data at Hindustan Times

Dear Colleagues,

As you know, the performance of our journalism on digital platforms is now at the centre of newsroom decision making at Hindustan Times, influencing how we plan, create, and deliver stories across all sections and locations. Unfortunately access to credible, relevant information about audience engagement online has been available only to a small group of people in the organisation, for reasons of both policy and technology.

We have for some time wanted to share more of this data, but we have only recently acquired the capabilities required to do it in a focussed and relevant way.

Opening up our numbers

The tool we have now put to work, Parsley gives us powerful real-time and historical numbers, and an interface that makes them easy to interpret, even for the numerically challenged among us. It also enables us to provide each of you with a customised view of the information that is most relevant to your own work.

Over the next month we will making that information available to you, but we would like to do so in the context of an informed discussion about digital metrics: why they matter to us, what they mean, and how we can put them to work in service of our journalism and commercial success.

Many of you will be aware that there is intense debate in newsrooms around the world about the value of analytics for editors and reporters, and the extent to which journalists should be exposed to digital performance numbers.

On one side of the argument are those who feel that data should inform every decision, from assignments and story placements to remuneration, and that access to all of that data should be completely open to everyone in the organization (and in some cases, outside of it too).

In the opposing camp are those concerned that an over-reliance on traffic numbers will drive a race to the bottom, and deliver a world of news sites plastered with angry opinion pieces, cat pictures, and soft-porn.

Guiding principles for analytics at HT

Although the finer points of the argument are far from settled, we are fortunate in being to draw from an growing body of experience, and formal research, around the world and to formulate some basic principles.

We are absolutely committed to bringing data into the heart of the newsroom process. We need to understand what our audience is reading, how much time they are spending with us, what they are sharing, which stories and videos they are finishing and which they are abandoning halfway. To pretend that this information is not available, and to try to function without it, is an act of willed blindness that will quickly secure our journalistic and financial irrelevance.

These numbers are a helpful guide only in the context of a clear understanding of our overall purpose, and our goals, tactical and strategic. We are a news organization with a core commitment to democratic accountability and to a public sphere enriched by debate, information and entertainment. Data can help us to understand how well we are doing that job, and nudge us to do it better, indeed, it should return us to our basic values, rather than leading us away from them. We must grow the absolute size of our audience dramatically, but we also need to greatly improve the quality of our relationship with individual readers and communities, and we aim to measure both.

We will deploy data in way that registers and supports the differences in potential reach and engagement across our very diverse areas of work. To put it crudely, the Friday review of a new Priyanka Chopra vehicle is will most often outperform a nuanced discussion of health policy in raw page views. However, a well-crafted story on a topic of narrower interest may convince a very important slice of our audience to spend a far longer time on the site reading, or have more impact. We will recognise the value of both.

We will make use of analytics in a structured fashion in the news conference and through the day, in regular reviews of our performance, and in the development of editorial strategy. However, we acknowledge that this is a new area for the industry and HT Media, and we will remain open to refinements in our implementation of these processes. We are developing the internal capability to discover, process, and render intelligible more data — that means new colleagues in engineering and analysis will be working alongside you, and from time to time we may bring new tools and metrics to bear.

What is next?

Starting this week, we will open up Parsley access following small group training sessions so that you can get to grips with its functions, and with some basic concepts in web analytics. This process will start in Delhi, and roll-out across all of our locations. Some of you will start receiving invitations to these workshops in the next few days, please do set aside time to attend.

It will be a challenging process in some ways — the numbers can be both thrilling and depressing — but I think you will find it adds a powerful new set of capabilities to your toolkit.

best

Nic