Digital audience editor Chris Moran, my former boss at Guardian UK and an all round top bloke, has explained Ophan to journalism.co.uk, and if you’re interested in knowing what I do or understanding how I do it, it’s an excellent primer on how we’re building analytics into the newsroom:
“We know everything about print, pretty much, there’s not many tricks left in the bag, we’ve done it for 200 years and we’re used to it. But the internet’s changing all the time, as much as anything else.”
An idea central to Ophan, said Moran, was for it to be useful to everyone working at the outlet, something he referred to as the “democratisation of data”.
This is at the absolute heart of what’s worked for us out here in Australia. We couldn’t have had the success we have out here without this feedback loop – not just the data, but also editors, subs and reporters all working with and caring about the data. Ophan’s transformed how we work, and will continue to do so as it adapts to the changing internet. There are no analytics tools on the market that do what it does, and building it into the heart of the newsroom is a crucial part of making it successful.
In other news, it’s been a little quiet round here as I gear up for leaving Australia; lots of small projects are on hiatus while I pack up life into boxes again, including Pocket Lint, my ongoing game design work on BOPTUB, and standard curmudgeonly blogging approach. Normal service will be resumed as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway.