Statistics Archive

Child sex trafficking and the 5 Ws and How: Another statistic gone astray

The report from KPTM, Fox42 news in Omaha, starts out strong: You might not think of Omaha as being a hotbed for the slave trade, but if you don’t, think again. There is evidence that hundreds of girls, some in their early teens are being sold as sex slaves in truck stops in our area.

How to turn website statistics into newsroom change

Once Stijn Debrouwere got through ridiculing the way the news industry uses website data, he did get to some positive approaches. Here’s one weird trick I learned from Eric Ries. No, it’s actually more like a four-step program. figure out what is important to your organization, what your goals are think of a couple of

Why journalists should love live website statistics

I promise that I found a lot to like about Stijn Debrouwere’s speech on website statistics in newsrooms. But before we get to this, another nit. Here’s Debrouwere: Imagine your newsroom has been pumping out articles about the papal election, yet it turns out that the article readers are clicking on is one about the

Let’s not be so quick to trash the website statistics dashboard

Brace yourselves, my fellow journalists. Today we’re going to talk about … numbers. Start with Stijn Debrouwere, who says: Pageviews is a vanity metric: something that looks really important but that we can’t act on and that tell us nothing about how well we’re actually doing. This is from a speech that Mathew Ingram later