Should you include the wire content that your organization re-publishes in Metrics for News?
The short answer
We do not typically recommend a news organization include wire content (Associated Press, Reuters, content from national-level publications like NYT, Washington Post, Bloomberg, etc.) in their Metrics for News data for a few reasons:
- For local publishers, wire content is often of low relevance to their audiences and their content strategies. Publishers usually prefer to study the performance of the original content they directly produce and control, and which is the basis for audience loyalty and subscriptions.
- Because wire content has high volume and usually low engagement per story, it can significantly skew the baseline of your entire Metrics for News application. For example, if wire content performs generally poorly and is published frequently, your entire baseline will be pulled down. This will inflate the Engagement Scores for most local content, because those articles are being compared in part to wire stories.
- Metrics for News is meant to be a tool to make long-term strategic decisions about how you apply your own people, resources and efforts to grow your own audience. Including wire content can muddy this.
The exceptions
Some publications have special situations where it makes sense to track wire content in Metrics for News. Some examples:
- A publication that has very little understanding of how wire content performs and is trying to determine basic patterns for how wire content performs compared to local content. The publication decides to keep wire content in Metrics for News for a few months and watch it closely, then remove it.
- A publication that is aware that there is a significant percentage of subscribers who are unsubscribing because of negative reactions to wire content (and misunderstanding the difference between wire and locally-produced content). The newsroom decides to enact a couple of experiments to attempt to rectify this by clearly labeling wire content on the site in a way readers will understand.
- A publication is seeking to determine whether to continue using wire content at all.