By Rob Gates, Analyst

Nothing should make a newsroom analyst cringe more than the notion that we have covered the same event the same way for the past 140 years and we’re not going to stop now…

Since 1875, The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., had covered the Kentucky Derby – horse racing’s (and Louisville’s) signature event – in more or less the same way. Even in the digital age, short of adding a bunch of photo galleries, videos and some interactives, the basic theme of the coverage remained unchanged.

And that theme is what’s important -- you can throw all sorts of goodies at the coverage of an event or topic, but if your content focus is off, you’re not maximizing your potential for either traffic or revenue.

I stumbled upon what would become our 2015 Kentucky Derby strategy while looking at past years’ metrics for another report. We had always looked at content buckets (stories, galleries, videos, etc.) as opposed to grouping all content by specific themes or topics.

In doing this, I discovered that while the bulk of our coverage was centered around features about horses, jockeys and owners, those were not the sorts of things to which our readers gravitated. Instead,  I found that anything we published having to do with wagering, picking winners or speculation on which horse would actually win, far outperformed those features that we had been writing the same way for the past 140 years.

Armed with this information, the newsroom and advertising department got together and devised a coverage and sales strategy that focused heavily on the topic of wagering.

LOS ANGELES, March 6, 2016 - The USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center has announced Jessica Clark’s appointment as a 2016 Media Impact Project (MIP) Senior Fellow. During her year-long fellowship she will write about and conduct a forum on the future of interactive storytelling.

Clark is an internationally published journalist, researcher, and media futurist whose work connects thought leaders across disparate disciplines. She is the founder and director of Dot Connector Studio, a cross-platform production and strategy firm whose clients include Media Impact Funders, Tribeca Film Institute and The Internet Archive. Clark brings over a decade of experience developing research and producing events with high-profile universities and national media networks, including NPR, PBS, CPB, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, USC Annenberg and MIT. She holds a BA/MA from the University of Chicago and serves as the Media Impact Funders' Director of Research and Strategy.

As an MIP Senior Fellow, Clark will explore how innovative forms of storytelling have ushered in new relationships between the physical and the digital; examine how evaluation practices have evolved within this new landscape; and consider their application to assessing media impact.

​Jessica Clark will present at USC Annenberg on April 21 at Noon in ASC 207. 

MIP strives to accelerate measurement thinking and open source tool development in order to explore, validate and share solutions for measuring impact. It is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Open Society Foundations. For more information, visit www.MediaImpactProject.org.

The Norman Lear Center is a multidisciplinary research and public policy center studying and shaping the impact of entertainment and media on society. From its base in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the Lear Center builds bridges between faculty who study aspects of entertainment, media and culture. Beyond campus, it bridges the gap between the entertainment industry and academia, and between them and the public. For more information, visit www.learcenter.org.

Located in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism is a national leader in education and scholarship in the fields of communication, journalism, public diplomacy and public relations. With an enrollment of more than 2,200 students, USC Annenberg offers doctoral, graduate and undergraduate degree programs, as well as continuing development programs for working professionals across a broad scope of academic inquiry. The school's comprehensive curriculum emphasizes the core skills of leadership, innovation, service and entrepreneurship and draws upon the resources of a networked university located in the media capital of the world. For more information, visit annenberg.usc.edu.