Professor Nicole Blanchett Neheli from Sheridan’s Faculty of Animation, Arts and Design recently published research findings on how metrics and analytics are changing current journalism practices.
Published in Digital Journalism, her paper “News by Numbers: The evolution of analytics in journalism” examines the use of audience data in newsrooms: does it affect best practice, the stories that are chosen for development, and/or how content is promoted online?
Nicole argues the importance of metrics and analytics, not just in building the scale of the audience, but also in the use of data on a deeper level to better serve a specific community – a strategy that might assist the sustainability of legacy media making the jump to digital.
These initial findings are related to Nicole’s PhD research, and were pulled from a multi-site, international ethnographic study assessing and comparing the use of metrics and analytics and journalistic practice at Norway’s national broadcaster, NRK; The Canadian Press, Canada’s national news agency; the Hamilton Spectator, a local newspaper in Canada making the shift from print to digital; and a similarly sized and situated local paper in the United Kingdom, the Bournemouth Daily Echo.
To read the full paper, please visit Digital Journalism online.
Congratulations, Nicole!