White Paper of Cxense / Reuters Editors Lab

5/20/2018 White Paper of Cxense / Reuters Editors Lab

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GEN Editors Lab

Cxense/Reuters Hackdays

*Cxense Developer assisting BBC developer who will eventually win the Hackdays


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Introduction

TheGlobal Editors Network

is a community dedicated to media innovation

supported by 20,000+ media innovators. More than 2,500 of those media innovators

participate in GENs yearly programmes and GENs annual conference called the GEN

Summit. GEN represents the leading media of the worldsee GEN community for

more)and organises events bringing together the best newsroom and opinion leaders

of the industry. Cxense (pronounced see-sense) is a global software company founded

by a team of software and Internet media leaders who share a passion for delivering

innovative and intuitive solutions that help companies understand their audience andbuild great online user experiences. When GEN discussed with Cxense how they were

achieving innovation through one of GENs programmes called the Editors Lab, along

with Cxenses involvement in providing expertise and opening access to their analytics

and content tools, it became clear that the value of integrating Cxense into the event

would have a great impact on the quality of the Hackdays for the participants while

giving Cxense the opportunity to engage with the participating teams, but also through

to expose their expertise through our live-coverage of the event for our entire network.

The GEN Editors Lab Programme

The Editors Lab Hackdaysis one of GENs key programmes in bringing innovation

to the newsroom. It is a worldwide series of Hackdays hosted by the worlds leading

news organisations such as The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pasto name a few.

The Editors Lab brings together developers, journalists and designers from the Global

Editors Network representing the best newsrooms from the city where it is being held.

During two days, teams build news prototypes around a theme linked to the latest

trends in media innovation. After two intense working days, teams present theirprojects in front of a jury who gives his verdict little after the presentations. The climax

of the season is the crowning of the overall Editors Lab Final Winner, which gathers

each national Editors Lab Winner at the GEN Summit.


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The GEN Editors Lab Cxense/Reuters Hackdays

29-30

th

May, 2014

The Teams

Seven news organizations entered teams consisting of a journalist, a developer and a

designer in this two-day competition. Teams included: BBC, Financial Times, Reuters,

McClatchy, Florida Times Union, KSL (Deseret Digital Media) and Montclair.

The Host

Friends and partners of the Global Editors Network, Reuters, provided a unique setting

for the teams. On the 33rd floor of 5,Times Square Building, teams were given an

excellent location and space for inspiration.

The Jury

Anthony de Rosa, Editor in Chief for Circa

Rob Wescott, Cxenses SVP of Business Development, North America

Evangeline de Bourgoing, Programme Manager at Global Editors Network

The Theme

Teams innovated around the theme Improving Loyalty. Some of the challenges

raised by this theme included:

How to boost the 'stickiness' of your website?

How to build a community of frequent users and encourage them to stay longer on the

website?

How to optimize loyalty using Big Data analytics and real-time tools?


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The Cxense Touch

*Cxense Masterclass

Cxense opened access to its analytics and content tools during the two-day event. The

tools are part of Cxenses Extraordinary Insight Engine (EIE). By crunching big data via

sophisticated algorithms, EIE provides the publishers with deep-insight analytics,

patterns and relationships that boost revenue and audience growth. These two tools

are used by the largest publishers all around the world and was a great add-on to the

creation of the teams prototypes during the Hackdays.


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Cxense Analytics:

Cxense combines real-time web stats, historical data and other

data sources into a single web analytics package. This data approach is the key to

unlocking extraordinary insights. All you do is add a simple and small code snippet to

your webpages. Cxenses Extraordinary Insight Engine creates anonymized profiles

that enable specific user sessions with automatically optimized content and ads.

Cxense Content: Your personalized content strategy will be matched with the

interests and objectives of your audience groups. Cxense is able to do this via their

Extraordinary Insight Engine (EIE), which collects and analyses context, user data,behaviour, trends, external data, demographical data, historical data and many other

data sources.

On the first day of the event, Cxense conducted a Masterclass to help participants

getting started on the companys technology and share their approach to innovation. A

team of developers and experts were on site to give advice to each team on how to

make use of all the functionalities of the tool and adjust the settings of it. Rob Wescott,

Cxenses SVP of Business Development, North America, was part of the jury that

awarded the winner.

The Challenges

Some of the teams were customers of others Analytics providers and thus there were

challenges to operate the Cxense script on their websites. Therefore, in order to use

Cxenses tools and benefit from the power of the data available, in the days prior to the

event, they replicated their websites and operated the script on the replicated version.

Below you will find insight on how three selected different teams approached thetheme with the help of Cxense.


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BBC

http://www.bbc.com/news/world/us_and_canada/

*BBC Team after winning

The BBC team, with their app Takeaway, won the Hackdays and were invited to

compete in the Hackdays Final at the GEN Summit 2015.

The winning team was composed of Nathalie Malinarich, Editor mobile & new formats,

Dima Jarkas, Senior UX designer and Sam French, Web developer.

According to the team, Takeaway is a mobile-first product aimed at growing

engagement among regular and casual users. For regulars, it is a page tailored to the

time of day and known interests. For the casual user, suggestions are based on entry

point and choices made by similar users. It can be consumed offline or as email. It

provides a new, relevant and contextual offer, while meeting our public service

obligations. On the technical side, The prototype is built in Ruby because its

lightweight. The demo replicates our site and dynamically inserts a Takeaway modulethat is contextual. The data for the widget is from Cxense. See their presentation:

http://slidesha.re/1qbN4Wd


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McClatchy

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/

*McClatchys Team

McClatchys project, Engage, won the audiences choice award, selected by all

participating innovators. The focus was on rewarding loyal readers with a better user

experience with fewer ads. In an interview given to Reuters Inside Agency, McClatchy

team member, Erik Frederick describes the prototype: The challenge was to use theCxense analytics tool and build a feature that made our news website stickier and

more engaging. We developed a way to measure true engagement and reward it by

improving the user experience namely, by reducing ad content. We wrote the rules

of engagement, which would be explained to users in general terms but not

specifically revealed (so readers couldnt cheat). We would award points for things like

sharing a story, eliciting referrals to our site through a share and making comments

that inspired reaction from others. We did not award points for a page view, or for a

comment that got no reaction, or for time spent on site in other words, things that

can be faked and dont indicate true interaction. A registered users engagement

score would be displayed at the top of the page seeing their score rise (and

occasionally fall). When they reached certain benchmarks, theyd see fewer ads, and

more news content higher on the page. More-engaged users would get fewer but more

finely targeted ads, based on their reading habits. See their presentation:

http://bit.ly/1ro12Ea


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KSL

http://www.ksl.com/

*KSL Team

KSL (Deseret Digital Media) had very productive Hackdays and even achieved to get

their project implemented on their real website on the last day of the event. In their

words: Users reach an end to logical flow when they view a car ad. We believe that

showing them relevant content at the bottom of an ad will increase the stickiness of the

site. Partnering with Cxense we will be the first among major car sites to try this. That

is how they describe how they came up with their project idea: We noticed using the

Cxense analytics that some ads had a high bounce rate. We implemented a

recommendation widget that leverages Cxense, and a JavaScript slider. This was

developed in our website development environment and pushed to the live site. They

now plan to test different versions of the widget to find the best design to engage the

user. We also plan to explore deploying the widget in other products on KSL.com. See

their presentation: http://slidesha.re/1ttweo0


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Lessons learned

The Hackdays highlighted different approaches to content personalization and the use

of analytics for this purpose. Most news organizations use analytics to deliver

customized content based on previous reading habits. They conceive features to offer

personalized content that is tailored to the interests of the readers and keep them

engaged onsite for longer. But McClatchy took a very different approach to the

problem of user engagement. They used the Cxense analytics tool to reduce ad

content instead of personalizing their editorial content. The team considered that their

website would be stickier if they offered non-customized content. This approach could

be justified by the fact that non-customized news allow the readers to have a more

comprehensive view of news. It also preserves the sense of discovery and helps

counter the filter bubble that closes the readers off from new ideas, subjects and

information.

In contrast, the BBC team reflected on the way to best personalize content. They

wanted to give their readers a customized user experience without betraying the BBCsmission to engage the UK citizens with impartial and accurate news and information.

They decided that the three articles appearing at the top of the newsfeed would be the

same for every reader. They would cover the three most important pieces of news of

the day that would be curated by BBC News editors. The rest of the content appearing

in the newsfeed would be customized. This process allows the reader to get

information that is relevant to its interest without missing the most important news.

These two above examples highlight two altering visions of content personalization and

demonstrate the versatility of the Cxense tools to execute these strategies.


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Survey

Post the Hackdays, the Global Editors Network sent a survey to all the participants.Here is a short selection of the most interesting answers:

How would you describe your experience as whole?

- It was well organised and very enjoyable.

- Enlightening and enjoyable

- Corporate has taken some interest in our pitch so the prospect of pushing someinnovation within our organization was perhaps the most rewarding aspect of my

experience.

What was the most useful part of the event for you? Why?

- Working with Cxense software engineers.

- Time to brainstorm solutions to current problems

- Networking with the other News companies. It is always interesting to see how

other companies are similar and how we could learn things from them.

What did you learn during these Hackdays?

- I learnt about Cxense (as I had not heard of them before), met a lot of new people

(as I only knew my colleagues). I also learnt more about Ruby (which I'm quite new to)

and JavaScript.

- I always looked at analytic data as a way to help companies but there are a

multitude of ways in which it can be used to benefit end users. I look at analytics

slightly differently now.

-

I learned more about the mechanics of Cxense technology and how it can be

used to improve loyalty.


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Industry Reaction To The Hackdays

Articles in English:

Hackday Insights: How to make your website stickier and more engaging? Reuters

Inside Agency: http://bit.ly/1ngYZ2J

Top News Organizations Go Head-to-Head Using Innovative Big Data Tools, Reuters

Inside Agency (This article was reposted multiple times by other news organizations)

http://reut.rs/1r1preR

BBC Wins Digital Publishing Competition Using Cxense Big Data Tools, Association of

Online Publishers: http://bit.ly/1lzoC0r

Sticky data tools win Hackdays for BBC, Gxpress: http://bit.ly/1lHSaJC

Articles in Norwegian:

BBC vant ackedag, Dagens Nringsliv: http://bit.ly/1vNyJCt

Hacker for Norge p Times Square, Dagens Nringsliv: http://bit.ly/1qorTzY


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Lets Innovate Together

Follow Cxense on Twitter @cxense

Follow GEN on Twitter @GENinnovate

See more pictures from the GEN Cxense/Reuters Event GENs flicker account.

To contact Cxense

and learn more about their products:

Lauren Pedersen, VP Global Marketing & Communications,

[email protected]

+47 90663094

Camilla Moen, Marketing Director

[email protected]

+47 47929141

More about Cxense: http://www.cxense.com/

To sponsor, host or participate in GEN Hackdays:

Colm Curneen, Deputy Director & Head of Business Development

[email protected]

+33153012441

Evangeline de Bourgoing, Programmes Manager

[email protected]

+33153012161

More about the Global Editors Network: www.globaleditorsnetwork.org

Documents

White Paper of Cxense / Reuters Editors Lab