FT creates dashboard to determine when old stories have traction

The Financial Times has developed a new dashboard that allows journalists to identify which stories from the archive are popular with readers again, and re-promote them on social media, reports Mădălina Ciobanu of Journalism.co.uk.

Ciobanu writes, “The dashboard launched in August and has been rolled out to the FT’s global social media teams in the past few weeks. It has been built using a platform called Chartio, and shows which archival content has seen an increase in traffic over the previous two weeks, and whether readers are coming to those stories through search, social media or by clicking through from articles posted on ft.com.

“‘Part of the idea was to have a system in place for how we use older content,’ Jake Grovum, US social media editor at the FT, told Journalism.co.uk. ‘Before this, it was done ad-hoc if something was in the news.

“‘This is a way to have that content re-surfaced for us and a way to be alerted that something is of interest, so we can re-promote it and let people know we have a story on a particular topic and they might be interested in it because it’s back in the news.’

“Some of the stories flagged by the dashboard are evergreen, such as this comment piece about the death of the 40-hour work week, which Grovum said has remained ‘as relevant and timely’ as when it was first published.”

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