It is! And I'm v. pro D-DDM. But as I read your post -- given it has been flagged to death I don't think I'm alone -- you didn't appear to be calling for that. As I recall, you appeared to be saying "who cares what editorial think, work out what you want and get some damn data" (which is where the straw man comes from, fwiw).
No. I wrote:
>> Act like engineers, work out what you want, test it and get some damn data on it.
Which is quite different from:
> riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product
I hope you don't need it explained, but just in case: we're ignoring all things not backed by data, which very different from ignoring a specific subset of people.
The downvotes are for my saying 'damn' and writing angrily (ie, being pissed off with the poor engineering discipline of the public service). I'm intending to leave this thread, however, and enjoy the downvotes as "editorial doesn't like it" is frankly pathetic.
That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making. The point is that non-data backed opinions belonging to anyone don't matter so much as the results of what you actually measure.
> It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purposes, not to drive eyeballs to ads.
Acknowledged, but effectiveness at that purpose is still measurable, and certainly should be measured as the BBC is publicly funded.
> not "we don't care what you think, people don't like the breaking news ticker so it's gone, welcome to cultural change granddad"
I'm unsure whether you're unfamiliar with media engineering, or simply creating a bizarre straw man of what was being suggested. Assuming good intention, and therefore the former, here's a more likely version:
"We've measured the breaking news ticker and find out it that X% of users find it useful, Y% read it, Z% engage with it, engagement with other stories happens A% more/less when the breaking news ticker is displayed over the top of it. Given that our goals are B, this indicates we should.