NewsBeat

12 NewsBeat January 2018 How a local paper built a tool to measure impact By KAREN K. HO M HOW DO YOU measure impact? any publishers are looking to outside sources for funding through foundations, investors, and subscriptions. In addition to analyzing interest in their work through pageviews, completion rates, stickiness, and other metrics, companies and newsrooms need to show how much of a difference is being made by their work across channels. The Journal Media News Group, a news organization located in the northern suburbs of New York City, created a way to measure many of their successes through Impact Tracker, a custom online tool developed by its staff that could soon expand from three Gannett newsrooms to 16 more in the USA Today network next year. ICYMI: NY journalist handcuffed to railing over his head In the online interface, reporters choose from 12 kinds of impact for their work — such as policy change, major citation, and government investigation — , add specific details, and track how their stories change over time. Editors can quickly see how their reporters are doing, as well as pull out information for columns, award applications, and performance reviews. did extensive research on impact tracking and what was already being done at nonprofits and organizations like ProPublica and The Center for Investigative Reporting. The newsroom's seven-person investigative team was the test group for this first version of Impact Tracker. "We wanted reporters to do this because they can connect the dots and say 'I know this happened,'" Delgado said. ICYMI: "She identified herself as a reporter. He then walked behind her and punched her in the side of the head" For Investigative Editor Frank Scandale, the Impact Tracker gave him and his Watchdog reporters a much easier way to organize the results of their work far beyond pageviews and other kinds of traffic. Scandale was part of the team at the Denver Post who won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for the paper's coverage of the Columbine High massacre. He says contests like the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service have always focused on impact but other deeply reported stories that weren't nominated for awards mattered, too. "We may not win an award but the [Impact Tracker] tool shows you the value of investigative journalism," he tells CJR from his cubicle filled with stacks of old newspapers and walls covered in pages of his team's cover stories. "It validates what we do. It's showing what we're doing in black and white and it doesn't get pushed to the bottom of some email." The project started through a conversation between Executive Editor Traci Bauer and Digital Director Anjanette Delgado in January of 2015. "If we become a slave to those metrics at the expense of not knowing about impact, we're going to wake up one day and be very regretful as an industry," Bauer tells CJR. "When I said, [impact is] impossible to measure, Anjanette had this look on her face like, maybe that's not so impossible." In September, the first version of the Impact Tracker started as a Google Form, a free online survey and information collection tool. "We started out that way because it had a low barrier to entry and you can experiment," says Delgado, who also Anjanette Delgado, digital director of The Journal News, lohud.com and the Poughkeepsie Journal, with the newest version of her Impact Tracker. — Photo by Karen K. Ho A screenshot of the options available in Version 2 of the Impact Tracker for recording actions caused by a story.

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