LONDON — If “data is the new oil“, The Guardian is sitting on a well. The news publisher has built its own in-house analytics platform, dubbed “Ophan”, to measure dozens of metrics for thousands of stories, chief digital officer Tanya Cordrey tells Beet.TV.
“It shows the performance of our content at any moment of any day on tTV screens all around the building,” Cordrey says. “That helps the editorial team understand what happens to their articles when they go live.”
But Cordrey says journalists don’t end up purposely writing stories to be highly-trafficked: “The data doesn’t determine what we cover but it does determine how we amplify it. We’ve got a much better understanding of which platforms and audiences are going to react to which content.”
FastCo looked under the hood of Ophan recently in this article.
We spoke with Cordrey as part of our series titled “The Road to Cannes,” a preview of the Festival and an overview on the state and future of digital media by a range of thought leaders. The series will be published over the next four weeks. The series is sponsored by Videology.