16. USC-MIP – Your Partner
• Managed Cloud Hosting
We become your IT staff
• Help with customizing your set-up
Take advantage of MIP’s industry-wide expertise
• Training and customer support
Help you interpret your data and make it
actionable with live user support, a user
community and online documentation
Hello and welcome to the NewsLynx experience. This presentation is an overview of the platform’s fundamental concepts and it’s value.
So what is NewsLynx? NewsLynx is an open source platform that helps you tag and track the traffic of each of your stories across your website, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. But NewsLynx goes beyond measuring page views and user sessions because you can also add other indicators of a story’s impact such as media pick-ups, e-mails from engaged readers, and awards. What makes NewsLynx is unique in that it lets you see both the quantitative and the qualitative indicators of your story in one place.
It was developed by Michael Keller and Brian Abelson at the Columbia School of Journalism’s TOW Center for Digital Journalism. MIP’s role is to offer managed hosting, help with set-up, training and support.
So let’s take a quick tour …
So let’s start from the beginning. The way NewsLynx works is it accesses your stories through your own RSS feed. You then connect them to Google Analytics and several social services: Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
During the set-up process, you are also asked to provide other important information about your site.
The goal of NewsLynx is to tell you the complete story of your stories. On a daily basis, this is what you’ll see. This is the article page. Here you get a dashboard view of the activity of your top articles. This particular screen shot is showing you “all articles”. On the left you can see you can filter by keyword, date and subject tags – which we’ll get to in a minute.
Here is a close-up of that view. You can see the metrics for each are summarized. You can sort the view by each column.
One of the things people told us at ONA was they that someone on their staff spent enormous amounts of time searching through all their different services to find out how an article preformed. They saw aggregating all this information in one place as a great time-saver.
Now if you click on any one of these articles, you drill down to the article’s Detail page. This is what I think is really cool (go to live if possible). It gives you a full timeline visualization of a story’s life. It’s contextualized, it has detailed metrics about traffic sources and reader behavior. This view also shows top-level tag information…
… allows users to manually create an impact event
… and download an article's data.
While we’re looking at this, it’s a good time to circle back to tags. Tags are something you set up when you initially configure your platform.
There are two types: subject and impact tags. Each newsroom customizes their own. Subject tags are your basic taxonomy like you have in your CMS. In fact, most newsrooms use the same subject tags their CMS. In the article view, you can sort your top stories by subject tags.
The second type of tag is impact, which has two dimensions, category level. Each impact tag can have one of four categories:
Citation - like in a court case or another article
Change - like a law being passed.
Achievement - like an award
Promotion
Other - Anything we might not have thought of yet.
And one of five levels:
Individual
Community
Media an organization that republishes
Or Internal your own organization
Importantly, impact tags don’t belong to articles directly — they are assigned by a member of your staff to events which are in turn assigned to articles.
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The second tab is How people are reading and finding it—This is a selection of Google Analytics metrics around platform breakdown. Similar to the comparison view, it answers certain questions like:
On which devices are people reading?
Is traffic internally or externally driven.
Who referred traffic.
A lot of people consider this to be a very useful view. Michael and Brian did a lot of research prior to writing this application. They interviewed people in working newsrooms that were required to produce reports. These were the questions they received again and again.
The third tab on the detail page is Who tweeted it? This section shows a list of everyone who tweeted a link to this article as obtained by querying the Twitter Search API on a regular basis. The list is sorted by the number of followers the account has in descending order.
On the Detail page you can also create an event and associate it with an article. Events are displayed below the graph and you can filter them just like you filtered articles in the comparison view. You just click on the “Create event” button and fill out the form. Typically this is something an individual reporter would do when they become aware of the response to a piece.
The second major area is the Approval River. This is your place to go for monitoring a number of automatic tasks that are continually crawling the web for evidence of your journalism and its effects. This actually precedes the article section in your work flow.
So produce the article dashboard you just saw, you create what the NewsLynx calls recipes. These performs search tasks for mentions of your content or organization. Those searches turn up potential events that you approve or reject here in the Approval River. If you approve an event, you’ll be asked what article it should be assigned to and what impact tag to give it.
So, we leverage this cooking metaphor – recipes. The interface asks users to create “recipes” that let them connect to existing clip-search-type services or perform unique searches on social media platforms. The results of these recipe searches go into a queue where they can be approved or rejected – that’s the approval river.
Out of the box, NewsLynx supports the following recipes:
• Google Alert
• Twitter List
• Twitter User
• Twitter Search
• Facebook Page
• Reddit Search
But you are not limited to these - and you can create your own on this tab (show). Once you fill out the parameters, that Recipe is created and runs as often as you told it to. When it finds matching hits, it will show up as a pending event in the Approval River you just saw.
Here’s a close-up of a couple of pending Events. You can edit any Recipe by clicking the gear icon.
When you click the green check mark to approve an event, you’ll get a window with a range of options on what to assign that event to.
And just to complete the pipeline, those events and tags are then reflected in that article’s data.
So MIP’s role in all this is to be a partner and to help you be successful in using NewsLynx. The things we can do:
Managed Cloud Hosting
We become your IT staff
Help with customizing your set-up
Take advantage of MIP’s industry-wide expertise
Training and customer support
Help you interpret your data and make it actionable with live user support
a user community
and online documentation
For more information on NewsLynx and how MIP can help with your custom deployment, please reach out to us through one of the numbers on your screen.
Thanks for your attention.
