Roman Heindorff is the co-founder and CEO of Camayak, a content production tool that empowers editors, improves communication, and streamlines newsroom workflow.

I suddenly sat up. Five minutes into a presentation by the local Indianapolis media leader at this college media convention, Chartbeat had come onto the agenda. As the speaker described how critical Chartbeat was to her newsroom’s day-to-day workflow, I noticed that almost half the screens I could see were displaying Chartbeat. Each listener had pulled up his or her own newsroom’s Chartbeat dashboard. “Wow,” I thought. “Our clients really like this.”

Tech products have a chicken-and-egg need to improve their offering while growing the market who are willing to pay for it. The two are inextricably linked: you need users to help you find bugs and generate new feature ideas, but you also need to be useful enough to your audience that they keep coming back for more. If you can do those things then you face an even bigger challenge: communicating your value to folks who aren’t early adopters and don’t have the time to learn about new tools. Chartbeat has joined other tools like Slack and Snapchat in quickly reaching this critical mass among newsrooms.

“Tech products have a chicken-and-egg need to improve their offering while growing the market who are willing to pay for it.”

After bumping into Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile on a flight from New York to London, I wondered if student newsrooms using Camayak in conjunction with Chartbeat would feel more prepared to tackle their digital roadmaps. Camayak is like Basecamp for newsrooms: it brings process to your production so you can automate tasks that otherwise clutter your day. Camayak also has much in common with Chartbeat’s core principles, like emphasizing strategy over short-termism and following our clients by telling stories with the data they’re generating. The use case for a newsroom using Camayak to manage their editorial reaction to data coming from Chartbeat was compelling.

Flash forward to the presentation in Indianapolis. It dawned on me that equipping our clients with Chartbeat would help them get even more from Camayak. My next immediate thought was that newsrooms don’t just like seeing their own data, they want to see other publications’ data too. Since student media groups have a leg-up with their on-campus audiences (although you could argue they compete for national and prospective student attention), I asked a group of our clients if they’d be interested in sharing their Chartbeat data with their peer publications, if they’d be supportive of nationwide benchmarking. The response: “of course.”

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Networking Newsrooms

Since we got started in 2012 we’ve been interested in the network-effect idea of allowing campus newsrooms to leverage one another’s resources, to build a stronger ecosystem of reporting on campuses. In reality, pulling this off is hard. You need editors to talk to one another, and you need infrastructure in place to sustain the efforts into the next academic year. While we keep working on that with the help of some of the top student media groups in the country, we’ve launched a shared Chartbeat account for 12+ campus newsrooms to track their own – and their peers’ – web data. The benefits so far, like seeing what’s working on other campuses and responding to national-level incidents on campus, have been playing out nicely. But we’d like to do more.

We’re curious to see how these publishers with typically transient audiences can turn incidental visitors into loyal readers with Chartbeat tools. We work with thousands of student journalists every day and are excited to see where we can take this idea over the next 12 months and beyond. This is just the start.

Learn more about our partnership with Camayak over on their blog.