Audience Analytics Changing Journalism Education
This post originally appeared on MediaShift on July 16, 2015.
Discuss audience analytics with any group of journalists and at least one person is going to start complaining about click-bait or pandering. It’s true that the information you get from taking a deep dive into the data on how your audience accesses and consumes your content could lead your news organization astray, but it can also be an incredibly powerful strategic tool for creating more engaging journalism.
“In some ways it’s old thinking, that we know better what stories we should be doing than the audience,” said Matt Sheehan, who directs the Innovation News Center at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. “We can definitely use analytics to be informed about the stories and story types that attract audience, but we’re not going to shy away from covering a story because it’s not popular.”
The University of Florida’s student media operations have regularly used Google Analytics and Chartbeat to look for trends in traffic and usage says Sheehan, and it’s now one of five schools involved in or working on partnerships with Parse.ly, an analytics tool that’s hoping to break into the journalism education market.
