13 May 2026 · Harriet Keene
What a Tuesday conference can actually use
A chart that cannot be read from the back of the table is a decoration. Notes from sitting in on planning meetings in regional dailies and magazine weeklies.
Most newsrooms already possess more figures than they can hold in one sitting. The failure is rarely collection. It is the moment when an editor looks up from a laptop and tries to tell a room of twelve people what last week actually did.
A usable chart for that room has a title that states a claim, not a metric name. “Saturday long reads held readers past 700 words; weekday explainers did not” can be argued with. “Avg. engagement, rolling 7d” cannot, because nobody in the room agrees what the words mean.
We draw for projection and for A4. That means fewer series on one axes, labelled peaks rather than legends that require a key, and a type size that survives a tired projector. Colour is used to mark a single contrast: this week against the median week, or subscribers against everyone else.
The other half of the pack is the crib sheet. Section heads will not reread twelve pages before conference. They will glance at a page that lists the five pieces that brought returning readers and the three slots that leaked them. If that page is missing, the charts become wallpaper.
None of this requires a new screen on the wall. It requires an agreed question for the quarter and the discipline to leave other questions in an appendix.