Newsroom data insights of a leading Danish tabloid

With a wealth of data on users’ behaviours and habits at their fingertips, news publishers may well be tempted to allow all decisions to be dictated by numbers. At Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet, however, the final calls will always lie with journalists and editors, despite data affecting every aspect of the organisation.

The tabloid has built a very strong data culture throughout the organization. Their goal is to let data inform as many of the decisions we make as possible. They do not wish to be data driven nor are looking for full automation. They believe, especially when working with journalism, that the final decisions should be made by people, so they want the organisation to be data informed.

WAN-IFRA recently caught up with Worm-Petersen from Ekstra Bladet to hear more about the balance between data insights and journalistic instinct, where data analytics has paid off the most at EB, and how GDPR has impacted advertising and audience engagement. He says the company’s newsroom is constantly consulting the custom dashboards they have built for them and they are extremely respondent to new tendencies and behaviours among users, which ensures that they always provide the most relevant experience. They divide all their dashboards and reports into live, tactical, and strategic. ‘Live’ being the dashboards that journalists and editors consult on a minute by minute basis to constantly optimise the performance.