Ten or more years ago, I worked in the 'new media' department of the UK's largest regional news group. It was a fascinating time to be a techie in a news organi

Ten or more years ago, I worked in the 'new media' department of the UK's largest regional news group. It was a fascinating time to be a techie in a news organisation, because it was fairly obvious to us that one day the internet would eat every aspect of the business - advertising, classifieds and eventually even news itself. The websites we had were rickety old classic ASP apps (remember when people wrote JavaScript on the server?!) One of my biggest projects was building the platform for analytics on all our pages. The only reason the business wanted this was so they could get their traffic numbers properly audited to sell advertising more easily, but we wanted to provide more value than that. We had reports showing the most popular stories by day, month, category etc, as you'd expect, and we thought perhaps this would be useful on the print side of the business too. The most wildly popular stories were exactly what you'd expect ("Stab victim vicar's child porn shame", that sort of rubbish) but obviously the front pages of the papers were all about roundabouts and fences falling down. Every month we gave them the data, every month they ignored it when making editorial decisions. Partly just because nobody really cared about the internet or what it thought, partly, I would hope out of some sense of public service or long term gain. Rounds and rounds of job losses later, I'm not sure if they're doing anything differently. Either way, it's fascinating that a decade on, in the face of much more data, and much more existential risk to individual news organisations, that this same argument can still play out the same way, even in businesses that are more or less _native_ to the internet.