How data can affect your writing
The importance of knowing a story’s statistics, writing that doesn’t end up being seen and insights from Stephen King are all part of his week’s roundup.
This week’s roundup includes why writers must be data analysts, writing things that are never published and perspective from Stephen King.
Access to data: If you’re a journalist, blogger or some other type of content producer, you’re by now used to also being a data analyst. Web traffic drives the stories we pursue and the projects we’re assigned in many cases. In others, we may just want to know if our instincts were right about that headline. It’s a part of producing digital content.
But until this week, it wasn’t for writers at The Washington Post and The New York Times. Journalists there were denied access to seeing how well their stories performed online. The problem with this, if you’re a journalist, is that you have no way of knowing how much readership is tied to salaries, promotions and new responsibilities.
Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that knowing this information can change the way you write, but that doesn’t necessarily make for bad journalism.
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