Why accurate metadata will be a key factor for success
News organisations still has content creators that most companys these days can only dream about. They got the tools to tell a story in various kind of ways and their toolbox is only getting greater and greater. Why not a live broadcast from the newest kid in town, Meerkat?
What has this to do with metadata? Without it your story is dead.
At Mittmedia we’ve built our own publishing platform and everything when it comes to content publishing relies on metadata. Every article, picture, video and what not need to have accurate metadata to get the content in the right spot on the sites. It´s not the easiest way to do it, but the upside is a very agile way to handle content.
Right now we are building an semi- (or full if you choose so) automated system to handle our front pages. An automation that are built on algorithms, algorithms that is created by journalists. Yep you got that right, word people doing number peoples job. We think that without editorial knowledge great news algorithms can’t be built. And everything in it, is about metadata.
Categories, tags, geolocation, pageviews, shares, engagment, comments, editorial prio, lifespan, referal, text lenght, byline.
Theses are just some of the variables to take into account when you massaging out an new algorithm. How much value is the editorial news prio worth against an X number of shares? And when do the articles lifespan value kick in? Should our most read journalists get an upperhand over the others?
Answer is: We have no idea. We might have a clue but we don’t know. And thats the thing, we need to KNOW. Not by hunch, not by a feeling. By data. And the only why to find out is to start working. And to do that we rely on 450 journalists to deliver the best metadata to their content possible. And i admit right away, we still don’t got the best tool to do it. We’re working on that to. And on automated super relevant push notifications. Do i need to tell you that they are built upon metadata as well :) More on that later.
