See Ari Bevacqua's presentation from Spark 2016, TrackMaven's annual digital marketing summit focused on the intersection of marketing art and science. Learn more at spark.trackmaven.com How can newsrooms harness the power of data and analytics without compromising editorial judgement? Ari Isaacman Bevacqua, Growth Strategy Editor at The New York Times discusses how she works with reporters and editors to increase audience reach and deepen engagement while maintaining Times values. She will delve into concrete tactics for how the Times works to amplify especially important stories, such as poverty, and answer questions from attendees.

1. Growing Your Digital Audience
Ari Isaacman Bevacqua
ari@nytimes.com
Spark, by Trackmaven
May 2016
The New York Times
How the Times is using data to inform our audience development
while maintaining our editorial judgment

2. How do you grow
your digital audience?

3. You probably already know to…
Optimize for
social.
Optimize your
product and
your publication
processes.
Measure
everything.
Test everything.
Learn
constantly.
Keep it agile!
Optimize for
mobile.
Optimize for
search.

4. What’s missing from this slide?
Optimize for
social.
Optimize your
product and
your publication
and distribution
processes.
Measure
everything.
Test everything.
Learn
constantly.
Optimize for
mobile.
Optimize for
search.

5. Editorial Judgment

6. How do you grow your digital
audience, in a way that is informed
by data, but ruled by editorial
judgment?

7. Create, communicate and use
guiding principles
for data in your newsroom.

8. Guiding principles:
1. Editorial judgment comes first
2. Context is critical
3. Don’t treat numbers like a scorecard
4. We are data-informed, but not data-driven;
our mission of great journalism remains
unchanged

9. How do these guiding
principles work in real life?

10. Instead of reporters and
editors asking
“Did it do good?”

11. We are designing
experiments with editorial
and audience goals in mind.

12. For a story about the culture at Amazon we
hoped to inspire an engaging discussion
among readers.
And we broke the record for
the most comments ever on a Times story (5,858).

13. For the first Republican debate, we wanted to
drive readers our Slack-powered live chat.
We had one of our largest liveblog audiences ever.

14. When Nick Kristof and Adam Ellick traveled to
Angola to tell the story of the world’s deadliest
place for kids we wanted to over-index for
readers in Angola.
We worked with a leading Portuguese new outlet to embed
our video on their homepage, reaching a significantly higher
percentage of readers in Angola than usual.

15. PLAN experiments with both audience and
editorial goals outlined
DO your experiments, measuring along the
way
ASSESS & LEARN from your outcomes,
discussing both audience and editorial
goals and sharing these learnings across
teams
Plan, do, assess & learn