Two years in the making, NewsLynx is an analytics platform designed to help newsrooms track whether their stories are referenced in official reports, legislative actions, investigations or other contexts. NewsLynx wants to help news providers go beyond the current typical metrics of page views, time on pages and shares.

In an executive summary, project team members Brian Abelson and Michael Keller noted, “As non-profit newsrooms apply for grants and appeal to donors for funding, they often need to explain in formal reports 'how well' their stories performed – not just in terms of impressive traffic, but in qualitative evaluations of the 'impact' their reporting had on the world: Did it change a law? Did it move the needle in the conversation? Did it meet the expectations — however defined — the organization had for it?”

As research fellows at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Abelson and Keller built the new platform to integrate quantitative information that previously did not exist in metric providers.

With this project, NewsLynx:

•   Seeks to augment metrics with context by showing how an article performs in comparison to the average of all a publication’s articles, and allows comparisons within subsets – all immigration articles for example, or within any user-defined category.

•   Provides efficient tools for tracking, categorizing and assessing indicators of impact aside from audience reach. 
Such impact indicators might be legislative reform, or community action. Tracking this has previously proved extremely difficult and time consuming. NewsLynx’s “Approval River” functionality aims to reduce the effort associated with managing the traditional clip searches and social media searches that newsrooms use to monitor impact. Crucially, it allows users to apply consistent (and therefore comparable) meta-data to impact indicators.

•   Implements a framework that gives newsrooms enough structure to categorize “impactful events” across similar boundaries, while also providing enough freedom for a newsroom to create its own impact definition that matches its particular goals. Importantly, the researchers believe that successful, long term impact measurement can only result from identifying such organizational goals.

Details are in the full NewsLynx: A Tool for Newsroom Impact Measurement report. The NewsLynx project was made possible by funding from both The Tow Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.