As we start a new year, how are you measuring the value you provide to audiences?

All that said, TJR’s significance has been in culture change. Shifting perspective. Letting go of the idea that consuming journalism has to mean reading a 1,000-word story on a news website.

It helps us ask: what value and services do we aim to provide? And how might we measure THAT?

This seems like a great time to mention the dozen or so newsrooms that have come to me asking for help with building and measuring this model. Support in building a less-manual solution for this work could help a lot of news organizations. 🙏 💸

Literally, how? Slowly. Manually. I’m not a data scientist. My one attempt at learning SQL was short-lived. 🫠 I look up each metric on a monthly basis, and calculate the total. The metrics that make up TJR are not compared to each other — some inherently have more value to us than others. 🍎 🚫 🍊

It complements it by showing a broader picture of where audiences are finding, reading, watching, listening to our journalism. That data helps us identify ways we may need to diversify our audience strategy, so we’re not over-relying on one format or platform to serve all user needs.

Why views? Not all platforms where we publish our stories offer uniques data (bummer!) and we’re aiming for as much consistency as possible in the TJR metric. This model isn’t meant to replicate or replace reporting on our audience size, like uniquely monthly visitors to our website.

My most important point: TJR is not meant to be a perfect data point. We don’t discuss it in absolutes. It's meant to change the narrative we tell internally/externally about the impact of our journalism and what we value: that people actually read what we report, no matter their preferred format.

Two frequent questions I've heard on this model:

1. Why views and not a metric that better represents unique audience size?
2. Literally how do you calculate this?

Let’s get into ‘em…

For context, here’s the @columjournreview.bsky.social article about why we developed this metric (TJR) to help capture data on all of the ways we publish our journalism in formats across platforms and products www.cjr.org/analysis/ale...