In a newsroom, making decisions without data usually means relying solely on intuition, habit, or personal perception. Intuition can be useful, especially when it comes from editorial experience, but on its own it has clear limits. It does not always allow us to distinguish between what seems to work and what actually works. Nor does it allow us to properly understand which types of content generate deeper reading, which build stronger loyalty, which convert better, or which formats perform best with certain audience segments.
Working with data does not mean replacing editorial judgment with a metrics dashboard. It means adding a layer of evidence to the decision-making process. A newsroom that begins to work with data in a mature way does not stop doing journalism: it does it with more information about its audience, about the performance of its content, and about the real impact of its decisions.
This first block is designed for people who do not yet work with data systematically or who do so in a very basic way. The goal is not to turn the student into an advanced analyst, but to provide a sufficient foundation to understand what is measured, how it is measured, how to interpret results correctly, and how to present information in a clear and useful way.
By the end of the block, the student should be able to answer questions such as:
• What is the difference between an important metric and a secondary metric?
• What does it actually mean to “measure well”?
• How does a user action become a data point in a dashboard?
• What basic information can be used to understand different types of users?
• How can a dataset be summarized properly?
• Which chart should be used in each case?
