You shall know their Velocity  

When I wrote for the Associated Press, I often attended events swarming with journalists.
 
Sometimes these were press conferences, sometimes a courtroom, sometimes a protest.
 
What they all had in common was you had to throw a few elbows around cameras and microphones to gain access to the thing you were covering – or even just to get some personal space.
 
Back in the newsroom, you always had an eye and ear on the wires to monitor what other news outlets were doing. You didn’t want to be left behind on a major or even a minor story.
 
There’s a term for this mentality: Pack journalism.
 
Media coverage begets media coverage. The news cycle feeds off itself.
 
Taking cues from competition can be a savvy strategy and ensures that no news outlet gets left behind.
 
But is this always beneficial for the audience?
 
Now with analytics, there is often a way to tell if you should care about what the competition is doing.
 
Case in point, take a look at how the website Mashable determines what stories to cover.
 
Mashable has developed Velocity, its own in-house predictive analytics tool that scours the web to find the best performing and most shared articles.
 
"We like to think of it as a digital crystal ball," said Mashable’s global news editor Louise Roug.
 
According to an article about Velocity in journalism.co.uk:

So you may be saying, that’s great for Mashable. But I don’t have my own fancy web-scouring predictive analytics tool. How does this help me?
 
You can use your own free version of Velocity by going to Google Trends and see what people are searching about right now. Try it.
 
If you want to take a wider perspective, enter keywords into Google Trends and see how people search for them over time. Are there peaks and valleys? What accounts for that? How can you take advantage of the high points?
 
And there’s more good news with Velocity. Mashable doesn’t stop by monitoring others and keeping that data to themselves. They actually publish a graph of each story’s performance as tracked by Velocity above each link on Mashable. See for yourself.


 
And even sites that don’t have the transparent graph like Mashable usually have share buttons next to the story. You can get a rough idea by comparing those stories with others on the site – or stories that have been online for a similar time frame – to determine its popularity with readers.
 
This doesn't replace making decisions about what's important and worthwhile to cover. Humans still have to be the deciding factor. 

But if you look at the numbers behind what others are doing – and not just pack journalism for the sake of pack journalism – it will provide insight that you wouldn’t otherwise have. You can learn what an audience really cares about.
 
That can help put you at the front of the pack.
 
Thanks for indulging my obscure Dave Eggers reference for this week’s title. As always, you can find more about analytics by downloading my book. If you enjoyed this week’s free newsletter, share the love on Twitter!