Illuminations Blog, JTM News

The Weekly Illumination — Issue 24

Welcome to the Weekly Illumination, a JTM newsletter offering a quick look at the week in journalism with a focus on what’s working in today’s news ecology. In this week’s Illumination we’ll look at how analytics are transforming what you know about our audience and invite our readers to participate in a survey about engagement as part of a new project JTM is developing in partnership with ASNE.

Odds & ends and odd ends

We want to know how you see community engagement

Journalism That Matters is building an interactive platform for peer to peer learning for journalists and news organizations interested in community engagement. To provide an orienting entry point, the homepage will link to responses to the questions we’ve heard most often as we’ve listened to the needs of those involved with engaging their diverse communities.  We want to offer a variety of perspectives to common questions from a diversity of people and a diversity of media. That’s where you come in. As someone who is actively involved in engaging your community, please give us your response on any or all of these questions using the form posted to our new site, which will be launching later this year at www.engagementhub.org

Tips and Tricks

A look at analytics

Before Google Analytics launched in 2005, it was difficult to obtain much information about who was visiting a Web site and how long they spent online. Today, tools like Chartbeat and Google Analytics give publishers more information than anyone imagined a decade ago, but how should news sites use that information. Matthew Ingram shares in GigaOm how traffic data can pull publishers away from their editorial goal as they chase after advertising dollars. But that data is actually being used by some sites to tweak a visitor’s experience in an effort to maximize impact. For example, when a user visits Buzzfeed from Pinterest the button to share on Twitter disappears.

Jobs of the week