Cultivating a data culture — one step at a time — at the Los Angeles Times: Claire Peters

By Christi Warren

Like many media groups, the Los Angeles Times is hard at work figuring out how best to leverage its audience data to provide an overall improved user experience.

Helming some of those efforts out of its El Segundo office is Claire Peters, senior user experience and consumer researcher at the LA Times.

As part of her work to advance those goals, Peters has collaborated with other newsroom leaders to get every journalist access to data analytics tools and to

shift the focus away from just growing traffic. Instead, the LAT now focuses on growing subscriptions and setting widely understood goals around those metrics. Understanding what those goals mean and how to get there is next.

“We’re stuck in the awareness phase,” she said. “We want people to be more aware, but my point — and something I’ve emphasized with my stakeholders — is we need to know what we want the fruit of that awareness to be. What comes after data awareness?”