Week 3: Metrics Meeting-Pressbox

Audience Analyst

For every newspaper company, there's an individual who gathers data and assesses if stories are favorable or detrimental to the general public. Sandra Schlosser is the audience analyst at the Arizona Republic. 

PressBox Again?

Since I covered Pressbox in my post last week I won't go too much into it again but I had the oppuruntiy to attend a press box training with other journalists at the Republic this past week. Since its one of the newer tools that is being used by the reporters, Sandra gave a little "training" of what Pressbox does, the goal of Pressbox, how to use it, and how its the most useful tool they have. 

 Key Metrics of Pressbox:

• Traffic
• page views
• unique visitors
• referrers(special digital communities)
• Engagement
• engage time
• scroll depth

Sandra calls it the custom dashboard tool or the "cheat sheet" for journalists.

Audience Analyst Analysis

After the training, I sat down with Sandra and asked her what she thinks makes an audience stay engaged to an article from an audience analysts point of view. She claims that after viewing statistics for years now she still has absolutely no idea, but there are 4 points she feels has some effect on engagement.

- journalist has to have amazing story-telling skills

-the article has to be scan-friendly

-tone and style need to appeal to your reader

-HEADLINE

Next week is crime scene or court week so make sure to stay tuned!

Week 2: Engage or Disengage?

What's New at The Arizona Republic?
The Arizona Republic is working on 5 core goals this 2016. Their number one goal:
THE 20 INITIATIVE
“Increase quality engagement with 20% digital growth.” That means having 20% more page views, 20% more engaged time, etc, both individually but more so as a whole organization. To increase engagement requires journalists to engage two different audiences. The way the news is presented needs to be restructured to engage the audiences divided by generation, the younger generation engaging in digital media while the baby boomer generation still wanting their news presented through print.

Karina Bland: Killin' the Game
This past week I had the great opportunity of sitting down with Karina Bland, a senior journalist at the Arizona Republic. With her insight, I was able to understand how she finds her stories, how she appeals to her audience, and how she consistently makes her work fly off the charts week after week.

Here's how Karina breaks it down:
"Click-Read-Scroll"- the three step process any journalist wants their readers to do once they choose their article.
Now for the reader to click on an article it is so important that the Title/Heading of your topic is attention-grabbing. Have the readers WANT to read the story. So what makes a good heading?

1. News Ex: Heart Transplant Gone Wrong
2. Roundups (Best, Worst, Top) Ex: 10 Best Restaurants in Scottsdale
3. Number Ex: 20 Students Caught Cheating on AP Bio Exam
4. Question Ex: Are You Really Human?
5. Tips and Advice Ex: 100 Ways to Beat 100 Degree Weather in Arizona
6. Dramatic Ex: Bernie and Trump Seen Sunbathing On Beach

Next, to read and scroll the article has to be fascinating. It has to be told in way such that the elements of creative writing used to present the story appeals to the public. Karina describes engaging the audience by "telling it like you would see it on TV." Present your facts in a way that keeps the reader stuck to the story wanting to know more. In the end, less is always more. Present what is important. Use words and phrases that are easy to read and understand.
For example, here's two ways to present a story on a robbery at a gas station in Gilbert Arizona:
1) There was a robbery at a gas station in Gilbert. Both men were armed.
2) Kaylee, a mother of two, was buying M&M's for her children when two armed men walked into a gas station in Gilbert, Arizona.
Which one would you rather read? An article that presents the fact blandly, or one that describes the perspective of a mother who was there when it happened?

Another important aspect as stated by Karina is how some journalists design their own story. It is know as the "manipulative" or "strategic" way that journalists use to keep their readers engaged to the story. As a journalist, you want your readers to scroll. Your story might begin with a few words, something that grabs your readers attention. Then, you place a picture, right after your first paragraph. Now your readers are wondering, "Ok, I read the first paragraph, but what does the picture have to do with the article?" So, now you've got your readers scrolling, because now they want to know the relevance of the picture to the article. See how it's manipulative but strategic? Designing stories allows journalists to play around with how they want their articles to be presented such that they keep their audience guessing and wanting to know until the end.

The average read time for an article is 27 seconds. Karina's stories alone average a read time of 1.5 minutes.  So basically she's killin' the game. 

Karina has the #1 story on the entire AZ Republic website for the last month(be careful its a tearjerker): http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/best-reads/karinabland/2016/02/19/what-phoenix-mother-who-watched-her-12-year-old-kill-himself-wants-you-know/80583530/

Her other recent successes: http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/best-reads/karinabland/2016/02/12/arizona-school-shooting-one-thing-cant-fixed/80301314/

http://www.azcentral.com/story/life/az-narratives/2014/12/24/greatest-gift-heart-transplant-changed-one-life/20842095/

Psychology in Journalism
Unconsciously, us(the general public), are looking for articles we agree with or articles that enrage us. It's a natural instinct. Readers use confirmation bias, the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. We want to see articles that make us feel like there's people that think just like us. In turn the public begins to create echo chambers where different views are censored and only the ones with same thoughts are accepted. When people see their ideas constantly "echoed" back to them by seeing articles that state things they believe, it strengthens a persons individual belief system, thereby increasing engagement in certain stories.

Page Views & Success
1,000 page views- this is a minimum, if a story doesn't hit at least a 1000 views it's a bad story
5,000 page views- acceptable, it's a fairly decent story
10,000 page views-  commendable, something makes the story appealing
100,000 views- DEFINITELY AN EXCEPTIONAL STORY
Most of the time a story that hits a 100,000 views tends to be a breaking news story. Karina's stories always hit 100,000 views or more.

How Do Journalists Track Their Success Stories?
At the Arizona Republic there's a total of 3 programs that journalists use to analyze the performance of their content. They use Omniture, Chartbeat, and Pressbox.

• Omniture: tracks ONLY page views
• Chartbeat: Engagement time, number of people on that story at one time, how far a reader has read before stopping( actually points out at what point the reader stopped scrolling and exited the page
• Helpful for figuring out how to design the story such that the reader continues to scroll
• Pressbox: "new tool", total engagment time in minutes, average number of people reading through mobile, social media, or desktop, tracks how they found the story(on the Arizona Republic website, link through social media, etc.)

The Pressbox screenshot allows us to see Kaila White's best-performing stories from the last 30 days.

The Chartbeat screenshot is on one story, about the Desert Vista High School girls. This was Kaila White's best story, surpassing 100,000 views. You can see it had more than 200 people reading the story at the same time, and with each of them reading the story for an average of 40 seconds.

The screenshots below shows Kaila's best stories for the past week, both desktop and mobile. Up till the 4th story mobile and desktop have the same top stories. Starting with the 5th story, the top story changes from desktop to mobile.

That's all I have for you this week! I hope it was as interesting to you as it was to me!! :)

Week 1: Overview and Relevance

The nature of journalism is changing as we speak – in some section of the Arizona Republic, the number of people who view stories on mobile has already surpassed those who view it on a computer. With the popularity of new technology being discovered day by day, the ways in which we visualize and absorb our news has begun to change drastically. Despite the sudden increase in digital media taking over journalism, the main question that every journalist ponders is :

"What makes the general public stay engaged to certain articles more than others?"

To answer such a broad question, its important to understand how much journalism effects our everyday lives. Journalism itself is the reason we are aware of the happenings in our society as well as around the world. Whether it be checking the score of a sports game, or reading a movie or book review, we are constantly taking advantage of the information the "news" provides us. Journalism allows for us to read and internalize facts, opinions, and ideas of the environment we share with other individuals.

In addition to digging into aspects of journalism and trying to find the answer to the question I stated above, I will be exploring the differences in digital media and print newspaper. Specifically I aim to also answer the question:

"Why articles do better online rather than through print and vica versa?"

The Arizona Republic is Arizona's largest newspaper and it is where I will be spending the next 7 weeks trying to answer the questions I have put forth. I will be working with Kaila White a reporter for the Republic since 2012. Below is a rough outline of some of the things I will be participating in as a "intern" journalist.

• Interview Kaila White and a few of her peers about a millennial reporter’s perspective on writing
• Attend a 9 a.m. news planning meeting
• Go to a crime scene or court with a breaking news reporter
• Attend an interview
• Attend a training (usually about metrics or search engine optimization(SEO))
• Talk with an audience analyst about how metrics tell us what people like to read
• Come to a diversity committee meeting to hear about how journalists try to appeal to and represent a diverse audience
• Meet with a print editor about how they pick print stories

I hope to have new information for you within the next week, so stay tuned for what is to come!