Newspaper Companies Attempt to Catch Up with Data Analysis
October 31, 2013
The jargon-heavy article on Nieman Journalist Lab titled The Newsonomics of “Little Dad,” Data Scientists, and Conversion Specialists introduces the push big news companies are making towards data analysis. The article suggests that although news companies have lagged behind other web-based companies, they have started to seriously invest in their engineers and in mining the data they have on their visitors habits. Some expected emphasis is misplaced, instead of Big Data, Little Data is suddenly of great import. The article explains what one company experienced,
“We might have thought that progressive Schibsted would be farther along in the data sciences… Long-time Schibsted strategist Sverre Munck says that despite the company’s great successes and acute reading of changing consumer behavior, it still felt like it didn’t know what it needed to know. “Our analytics were haphazard, ad hoc, case-by-case,” says Munck, Schibsted’s soon-to-be-retired executive vice president. Where Schibsted believes its unique strategies are right…— it invests heavily. It’s now doing that in analytics.”
Some of the article is difficult to grasp, which may be a good thing. One surprise that caught the engineers off-guard was that a huge number of digital subscribers never registered for free before paying for a subscription. The focus on registered users shifted with this development, and this is only the beginning.
Chelsea Kerwin, October 31, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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One Response to “Newspaper Companies Attempt to Catch Up with Data Analysis”
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I thought this post was going to focus on how newspaper companies are using data analysis to develop and support news stories. customer behavior analysis? I guess I support any move towards fact based decision making, but just as many scientific disciplines have become data-driven, perhaps news organizations should focus on data-driven news, finding the facts and breaking news that is hidden in these big data sets. Their value is in providing curation, validation and improving searchability for their subscribers. If newspapers continue their move towards recycling the AP feeds, they won’t need data analysis to understand why their relevance and subscriber base continues to ebb.