FEATURE17 April 2014

Inside the data-driven newsroom

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Impact

Real-time data feeds and analytics technologies are radically transforming the way editorial teams work. Jo Bowman reports.

It wasn’t that long ago that, for a news editor to judge public reaction to a particular story, they had to wait for the next day’s post and gauge it by the weight of Letters to the Editor. Now, it’s possible to know within a fraction of a second, not only how many people are reading each story, but how long they spend on it, what they read next, what they were doing beforehand, which ads they look at – and even who their friends are. This is the era of the data-fuelled newsroom, where real-time information on what the world’s consumers are doing can help make or break digital news outlets.

For a digital-only news provider like Buzzfeed, the news and entertainment site best known for its amusing lists of timely news nuggets, technology is at the very heart of the organisation. Dao Nguyen, VP of growth and data, ...