The Dashboards Dilemma: Why Your Data Isn't Answering the Questions That Matter
It's 2025, and newsrooms are drowning in dashboards. That's the problem.
Services like Google Analytics or homegrown solutions — we've built an entire ecosystem of colorful graphs and real-time metrics that supposedly tell us how our journalism is performing. Yet despite all this data at our fingertips, most news organizations still struggle to answer a fundamental question: are we actually succeeding?
The problem isn't a lack of data. It's that we're asking the wrong questions.
The Dashboard Graveyard
Let's be honest: most newsroom dashboards have become digital graveyards where metrics go to die. They present endless streams of numbers — pageviews, unique visitors, time on page, bounce rates — without providing actionable insights. We've created a culture where editors and reporters check these dashboards out of obligation, not because they deliver value.
Why? Because these dashboards weren't built to answer the questions that actually matter to news organizations. They were built to present data, leaving us to reverse-engineer meaning from metrics that were never designed to measure journalistic success in the first place.
Sound familiar? It should. We're stuck in a "what" loop (what happened) instead of asking "why" and "so what now?"
The Moneyball Moment We're Missing
Remember Moneyball? When Billy Beane revolutionized baseball by identifying the metrics that actually predicted winning games rather than the ones scouts traditionally valued? News media needs its own Moneyball moment.
The Oakland A's didn't just look at more data — they asked fundamentally different questions. They didn't ask "how fast can this player run?" but rather "does this player's on-base percentage correlate with scoring more runs?" So the most interesting things are in the intersections and… well… arithmetic.
In news media, we're still asking the equivalent of "how fast can this player run?" with questions like:
How many users visited our site today?
What was our average engagement time?
How much traffic came from Facebook versus Google?
These questions tell us what happened, but they don't tell us why it matters or what we should do differently tomorrow.
The Questions That Actually Matter
So what should we be asking instead? Here's where the transformation begins:
Instead of "How many users visited our site today?" ask:
"Which stories resonated with our most loyal readers, and what do those stories have in common?"
Instead of "What was our average engagement time?" ask:
"Which formats and story structures consistently drive the deepest engagement with our target audience?"
Instead of "How much traffic came from search?" ask:
"Which search-driven stories led to subscription conversions, and what topics were they covering?"
Notice the difference? These questions connect metrics to meaning. They don't just measure activity; they illuminate patterns that can inform editorial strategy.
From Data Presentation to Decision Support
The fundamental shift we need isn't technological — it's philosophical. We need to stop building dashboards that present data and start building decision support systems that answer specific, actionable questions.
This means:
Starting with questions, not metrics. Define what you need to know before deciding what to measure.
Prioritizing actionable insights over comprehensive data. It's better to answer three critical questions perfectly than thirty questions partially.
Connecting metrics to mission. Every dashboard element should tie directly to your organization's definition of success, whether that's subscription growth, community impact, or audience diversification.
Building for decisions, not displays. Design around the choices your team needs to make, not just the data you can collect.
The hard truth is that most newsrooms don't need more dashboards. They need better questions. And once we have those questions clearly defined, we can build systems that actually deliver answers instead of just more data. Can we?
So before you build your next dashboard or check today's metrics, ask yourself: What question am I really trying to answer? And will this data actually help me answer it?
Because in the end, the most dangerous metric isn't the one that's trending down. It's the one that looks impressive but doesn't connect to anything that actually matters.