WAN-Ifra and 16 European news organisations have launched a Data Science Expert Group to help publishers use analytics to build audience and engagement.

The new network of news media professionals working in data science, data analytics and data engineering aims to arm practitioners with powerful journalism analytics built around newsroom priorities.

The research answers questions about who the audience is and what it needs, typically answered on hierarchy or power within the organisation, or based on assumptions.

“News publishers and newsrooms need better ways to understand what their audiences value, what engages them and what will make them paying customers,” the group said in a statement.

“All too often, navigating data science and data analytics can be a frustrating journey for both journalists and business developers in need of more actionable tools and smart analytics that go beyond the flood of data and traditional metrics. Increasingly, they ask their data teams to deliver insights and provide them with solutions that boost their decision-making, using machine learning and natural language processing tools to identify and push relevant content to their target audiences.”

By sharing user case studies, ideas, resources, and connections, the Data Science Expert Group intends to create real change within the industry. Its goal is to accelerate disseminating good practices used in news organisations and how these might apply to their data science teams. The scope of the group will be on four expert domains: data analytics, data science, data engineering, coordination and project management.

Members will meet bimonthly for sessions exploring operational challenges centred around practical use cases. Among others, topics will include communicating data in the newsroom, dashboarding and data visualisation, data team structure, KPI tools for the newsroom and editors, machine learning and natural language processing models for recommendation and targetted news, churn models and related algorithms, predictive analytics and KPIs, customer satisfaction metrics, and data warehousing. 

Members are invited to a dedicated online forum to build a community that endures beyond the group’s regular meetings, share resources, and ignite collaborations and discussions between members.

The first online meeting and roundtable discussion is scheduled for June 17 and will focus on dynamic paywall delivery and testing paywall based on propensity to build prediction segments.

The group is open to data practitioners working for WAN-Ifra member news organisations, and news media professionals willing to share experiences with industry peers to grow common knowledge can join the Data Science Expert Group. Complete the inquiry form here.

Founding members of the Expert Group include data experts from Amedia (Norway), Die Presse (Austria), DMGT (UK), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), GEDI Gruppo Editoriale (Italy), Groupe Figaro (France), Groupe Multimedia IPM (Belgium), Handelsblatt Media Group (Germany), Le Télégramme (France), Mediahuis (Belgium, Netherlands, Ireland), Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), PRISA Noticias (Spain), Ringier (Switzerland), Schibsted, and the Irish Times.