How custom content categories and automated tagging can track the qualities of your journalism that drive engagement
You put a lot of thought and effort into what you produce and how your audiences will receive it. In Metrics for News, you can create powerful dashboards specific to your news organization that allow you to analyze how your audience engages with the different characteristics of your content. You can do this based on a set of rules you define, or, free up your time for strategic work by letting Metrics for News do the categorization through machine learning.
In this article, we will discuss:
- What journalism characteristics can we track as content categories?
- There’s so many options! How can I pick what to track?
- What is autotagging and how does it work?
- How do I add or manage content categories?
If you are ready to add content categories and options or seeking troubleshooting tips, please continue to Managing content categories.
What journalism characteristics can we track as content categories?
You can track any journalistic quality to understand audience engagement, such as topics, user needs, time of day, visual elements, etc. By default, Metrics for News includes a set of common content categories to get you started. Let’s walk through these to understand how this function works and how to configure it.
- Topic: The general subject matter of the story (e.g., Government, Arts, Education, Business, etc.)
- Author type: The role of the author or similar (e.g., Staff, Freelancer, Contributor, etc.)
- Enterprise level: The level of effort that goes into a story. (e.g., Brief, Regular Story, Feature Story, Column, etc.)
Once you add a parent category (e.g., Topics), you can nest child options underneath it (e.g., Health, Politics, Education, etc.).
There’s so many options! How can I pick what to track??
When creating content categories, think about your organization’s strategic goals. One way you might choose to organize your categories and options is in a manner that reflects those goals. Once this is set up, your newsroom can jump straight into the metrics and get to analyzing without all the noise.
For example, your newsroom has a robust sports desk. You create a content category called “Sports” and options for sport types (i.e., football, baseball, basketball, etc.) and local regions you want to monitor for engagement (e.g., school sports by county). You can set each option with rules to filter specific content automatically. Stories can be filtered into one or more of these options (e.g., a story can be filtered into both “Football” and “Racine County” options).
Here is another example. Your newsroom has created several new podcasts in the past year and your organizational goal is to grow podcast engagement. You might create “Podcasts” as a content category, and then each podcast as a child option, allowing you to see performance by show. Then, you might create an option that includes all podcasts, or podcasts by target audience. If you have existing podcasts with historical content, you can import their historical content and analytics and have access to that data too.
What is autotagging and how does it work?
Metrics for News uses automatic tagging (or autotagging) to mark stories as they are imported in two ways:
- with the content categories and options you define; and
- through machine learning.
When you pull a report using an option (e.g., “Basketball”), the system looks for the stories that have been autotagged with that option and populates the report with those stories.
Metrics for News harnesses the benefits of machine learning and natural language processing to complete large-scale analyzing of the text. You can choose the extracted keywords as filters for your content categories. For example, let’s say the system identifies “Public Health” as a frequent topic in your stories. You can select “Public Health” as a content category option. This creates a dedicated dashboard for public health stories and the system will automatically filter those stories into this dashboard.
Changes to the categories and options go into effect once you save, meaning these changes will apply to all newly imported content moving forward after saving the new or updated topic. If you want to tag any historical content, please contact us about re-tagging content that has already been imported.
How do I add or manage content categories?
If you are ready to add content categories and options or seeking troubleshooting tips, please continue to Managing content categories.