Change the World Impact Tracker (Round 6)

United Kingdom Project type: large Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.


Journalism has an impact on the world: a story can drive policy change, trigger a resignation or investigation, inspire social media debate or launch a field of research. This project will build a ‘change the world impact tracker’ – an innovative digital tool to track and curate real-world impact. It will develop article badges and dashboards displaying impact information to readers, editors, publishers and donors. The project is a collaboration between Nature, a science journal and magazine that publishes high-impact journalism for the global scientific community, and Altmetric, a leading data science company that tracks online activity around scholarly research.

The solution

Media organisations worldwide are under pressure to demonstrate the value of journalism to readers, and to show publishers, advertisers and donors that journalism is worth investing in. Its standard to measure reader numbers and engagement using online analytics tools, but very difficult to measure if a news article made a difference in the real world. An impact tracking tool would help Nature and other newsrooms to quickly record and assess how their news articles ‘changed the world’, and to showcase that information.