Link: Making decisions based on available data

Published 2013-09-21

via Stijn 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 civil war in Syria. Thank God, you can finally stop writing about the goddamned pope because people don't care anyway. You can commission a new piece on Syria, perhaps even tailored to people's exact search terms so you're not just writing about what they care about, you're answering their questions too. I think that's incredibly useful information to have, information you can act on, right now.

Except I've never seen a news organization that has a workflow that would allow them to routinely respond to their readers' behavior right now. Content farms seem to be the only content producers with that capability.