For every URL shared by The Economist on Twitter, we see more clicks on average, and a substantially higher median compared to the rest. Even though the size of The Economist’s audience is less than a third of the New York Times’, it is generating hundreds more clicks per shared link.

I’ve said on many occasions that I am genuinely baffled how so many news organisations seem to think that they can grow an active community on their website, without investing in any community management.

Christopher was somewhat disparaging of data fetishists. He argued that an attitude of “Lets make some websites with lots of data” gets you nowhere since “ordinary people don’t give a shit” for data, they want “stories”

I did think there was a paradox at the heart of Christopher’s argument. There is no doubt, as Scott Byrne-Fraser and Alastair Dant have said before about dataviz at Hacks/Hackers events, that the story-telling needs to be more important than the aesthetic appeal of the graphics. Yet, inevitably, the demos that drew the most gasps and admiration from the Hacks/Hackers crowd were the most visually stunning ones.