May 8, 2012

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth post in our Q&A series with Parse.ly Dash customers. Every few weeks we’ll feature an awesome publisher that’s using Dash and dig into how they’re making use of freshly grown insights.

We recently had the privilege to interview Tom Bray, Senior Director of Digital News Operations for The Press Enterprise, to give us insight as to how PE.com uses Dash to better understand their readers. The Press-Enterprise and PE.com are THE sources for news and information in Inland Southern California.

Parse.ly: Why did you choose to use Dash at your publication? What were the pain points or opportunities you were trying to address?

Tom: Our technology guru entered into an impromptu partnership with the company. We sought information that would we could:

• Make available to our whole newsroom team
• Organize by post, author, section
• Be easier to use than alternative indexes
• Report as close to real-time as we can get

Parse.ly: What type of advantage does Dash give you?

Tom: Speed, urgency and sophistication. It has totally reinvented how we do our online decision-making.

Parse.ly: What are some of the primary use cases for Dash at your publication?

Tom: Every one of our reporters in the newsroom has an account and has access to the dash. We ask them not to compare their page views to their peers, but to chart their own work. We hope this allows them to cite trends in what their readers are interested in.

Parse.ly: How often are you and/or your team using Dash on a typical day? Are you in the system constantly? Do you check on an case-by-case basis? How is it integrated into your workflow?

Tom: The use is constant. I keep it up on my screen while performing other tasks. We seek trends all day long for organizing posts on our web site. The dash allows to pick up on trends quickly and respond just as quickly.

Parse.ly: What new features would be most useful to your business?

Tom: We need to build the perfect individual dashboard for each reporter and editor. It should allow them to gauge:

• Who their readers are?
• Where they come from?
• Where they go when they leave?
• What topics that bring them back?
• When they access our posts?
• Which device they use?
• What “path’ they take from one source of information to another?
• Their all-time most popular posts?
• Their all-time most popular tags/keywords/people?

– Tom Bray, Senior Director of Digital News Operations for The Press Enterprise