

Discoveries of Data Scientist Who Spent a Year at the New York Times - sabon
http://contently.com/strategist/2013/12/05/this-data-scientist-spent-a-year-deep-inside-the-new-york-times-heres-what-he-discovered/

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gammarator
The linked post by the data scientist is more interesting than this interview:
[http://brianabelson.com/open-news/2013/11/14/Pageviews-
above...](http://brianabelson.com/open-news/2013/11/14/Pageviews-above-
replacement.html)

~~~
mattlutze
That (the article linked to the scientists actual blog) was an interesting
read. Doesn't need to be revolutionary to be meaningful, and after maybe a bit
too much introducing, I found the explanation of his work clear and the
visualizations both meaningful and engaging.

Great bit of work the data scientist did.

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tomcam
A lot of jargon. Not much information. It did not inspire me to visit his
blog.

~~~
mcphilip
The "wildly speculative" Felix Salmon piece [1] referenced in the contently
post takes a look at some of the actual data that Abelson collected. Of note
is the chart showing how relatively accurate predictions can be made about how
many page views a given article will have based on a few simple variables
(e.g. did the main NYT Twitter account tweet a link to the article, etc).

However, I'm not sure I grok Salmon's angle of it being a bad thing that the
NYT almost exclusively promotes proprietary content over stories off the
AP/Reuters news wires.

[1][http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/11/15/how-the-
nyt...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/11/15/how-the-nyt-neglects-
business-journalism/)

~~~
nl
_I 'm not sure I grok Salmon's angle of it being a bad thing that the NYT
almost exclusively promotes proprietary content over stories off the
AP/Reuters news wires._

"Felix Salmon is the finance blogger at Reuters"[1]. There's his angle.

[1] [http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/11/15/how-the-
nyt...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/11/15/how-the-nyt-neglects-
business-journalism/)

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normloman
This guy thinks news outlets aren't using data to make editorial decisions as
often as they could. Maybe there's a reason his colleagues at the Times don't
defer to his data. If the new york times made every editorial decision based
on its effect on metrics like pageviews and social shares, you'd have the
Huffington Post. The online equivalent of a tabloid. Newspapers have a
responsibility to the public that transcends profits and popularity.

That said, we data could improve news consumption if used properly, especially
in terms of testing user interfaces. Data should be used to design how people
consume news. It shouldn't be used to chose what news to report.

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littlemerman
Here's the challenge for the next Mozilla Knight Open News Fellow:
[http://aronpilhofer.com/post/57733248022/from-documents-
to-d...](http://aronpilhofer.com/post/57733248022/from-documents-to-data-help-
build-a-toolkit-for-the)

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hessenwolf
I feel so terribly antiquated, as a mere statistician.

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danso
The amount of A/B or other systematic testing in the news industry is...well,
a bit behind par compared to the tech industry. So Brian's work is probably
one of the most methodological studies done within a news organization.

Yes, it is true that media companies have long been obsessed with ratings and
circulation figures, but these numbers have been, IMO, pretty "fuzzy." Before
the Internet, there were also audience surveys and tests that purportedly
tracked how readers progressed through headlines and stories...but how could
such measurements be precise without computers?

Even on a news website, the testing is not so straightforward. Does one story
get more eyeballs than the other because of a great headline, placement,
wording of a tweet, use of a graphic? Or did it get more eyeballs because it
was of a particularly salacious or notorious event? Since the number of
stories that a news site can produce in day is relatively small...around 100
to 1000...and the number of variances between topic, length, media assets,
time of day, is so large...I think Brian's analytical strategy was pretty
keen.

Anyway, here are the original links from his blog. I think there as thorough
of analyses as you'll find in other domains:

[http://brianabelson.com/open-news/2013/03/18/A-Metric-For-
Ne...](http://brianabelson.com/open-news/2013/03/18/A-Metric-For-News-
Apps.html)

[http://brianabelson.com/open-news/2013/11/14/Pageviews-
above...](http://brianabelson.com/open-news/2013/11/14/Pageviews-above-
replacement.html)

