Short post, but this is an article worth reading if you are interested in how a legacy print magazine is trying to fit into Bloomberg, a real time data organization.

Bloomberg is in the business of selling data terminals and everything else supports that cause. They are damn successful doing this and pride themselves on being the most influential news organization in the world. True or not is up to you, but they do produce news that moves markets.

I have picked out some points from the article and will share my brief thoughts on them, as they capture some broader themes we are seeing emerge across the online publishing world namely:

Profit - News needs to have a profit motive

AND

Measurement - Everything can be measured in the news creation process

Some other points from the article:

1. News should help people make money. Whether the creator of the news or the consumer of the news, there is a profit motive. If news makes money, then everyone is happy.

This flies right in the face of everything taught in Journalism school and the Businessweek staff that did not buy into this philosophy were shown the door or remain at Bloomberg and are adapting.

2. Bloomberg operates a “speed desk”, with the sole purpose of quantifying how much news they get out first and if that news makes people money.

I think this philosophy can be taken all the way down the chain from global news providers like Bloomberg to hyperlocal news providers. If you get more content out before your competitors (speed), you will build a loyal audience for that.

3. Every Bloomberg writer has a “dashboard” where the metrics determining his compensation — any scoops, hits an article attracts — are tracked.

This is precisely the type of feedback and support that content creators need and can use to their advantage. There is a real resistance to measurement in the newsroom, but it is going mainstream and it should be embraced as a positive not a negative. Staying employed, building an audience and improving the success of your content choices seems to be a reasonable plan, real time metrics can help you do this.

4. This is an angle I had not considered… the psychological impact over time on individuals of creating content that does not make money. As put by a former Businessweek employee about his colleagues… “They really feel like writing for Businessweek is a waste of time — it’s not making money, they get nothing out it,”

People are generally happier when they are making money and if metrics and data can help you to make your content more profitable then you should embrace it.

I have a bunch of searches set up to track the evolution of online news job postings. In particular I am looking for job postings that mention the words “real time”, “monitor site traffic”, “story placement”, “story trends” and other word combinations that capture the convergence of editor, web producer and stats geek.

Similar to the portadista job role I posted and reviewed last year, this one for a site manager at the TheStreet.com just popped up. I have highlighted the interesting chunk.

It is good to see big media sites starting to realize the value of using data and real time metrics to provide content decision support. We are big believers of this growing trend, which is why we are building a business around delivering real time analysis and insight to online news publishers via our service publishflow™.

Most of the newsrooms we work with are using traditional web analytics services like Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics to quantify their traffic and page impression stats on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Nothing shocking here, pretty much par for the course.

But it is rare that we see newsrooms really studying their analytics data on an hourly or daily basis to uncover new insight about visitor behaviour, story preferences and overall engagement with authors. There is a ton of information trapped in traditional web analytics packages that can help newsrooms become more efficient and make more money.

It has long been our vision at Kontexto, that newsrooms will need to start using traditional ‘return on investment’ business metrics for every story they create. Like every other business that makes decisions based on future returns, newsrooms can be no different if they wish to survive.

Companies like Demand Media, Huff Post and others are onto this, but AOL is the first big media brand embracing this approach and you can get up to speed on it in a brief, but timely article from Businessweek ‘AOL Moves to Build Tech ‘Newsroom of the Future’… CEO Tim Armstrong deploys software that helps journalists collaborate on articles readers seem to want, then reports the traffic they generate.

They are using stats, stats and more stats to determine what topics, stories and authors are successful over time. But more importantly, it uncovers what is not working over time so adjustments can be made.

“ROI”, “efficient allocation of resources” and “market driven story creation” may seem cold and dry, but I want as many newsrooms as possible to be around 3, 5, 20 years from now and using stats to help make sure this happens is something we (and AOL and a growing list) believe in.

Watch out for a big transition to data driven reporting in the coming years. Can’t wait.