In the fast-paced and ever-evolving landscape of the modern newsroom, journalists face an array of time challenges. With the 24/7 news cycle and the need to publish and understand performance across a variety of channels, reporters need high quality and timely data at their fingertips.

An in-depth review of systems and processes concluded that although the newsroom had access to a wide array of reports and dashboards, these often surfaced duplicated or conflicting information. NZME needed to rebuild their data models using best practice tools and processes to ensure the data delivered was accurate and trusted, and then deliver a consolidated suite of editorial reports to enable reporters to find the information they needed quickly and efficiently.

To deliver the insights needed by the newsroom, the NZME analytics team chose to work with granular, event level data streamed directly into the Google Cloud BigQuery Data Warehouse. Data quality is paramount, especially when wrangling millions of rows daily. To establish a robust foundation for the data models, the team looked to Google Cloud’s Dataform.

Dataform is a data transformation and orchestration tool natively integrated into BigQuery making it an obvious choice for NZME’s analytics team. Dataform’s integrations with code repositories and automated documentation helped analysts collaborate more efficiently, reducing the overhead of building and maintaining data models. Additionally, the modular structures built within Dataform encourages code reusability, driving simplification of data pipelines and ultimately a reduction in query cost.

Dataform has provided NZME with dramatically improved visibility into their data models and pipelines. Analysts can get up to speed more quickly on new datasets, and easily understand upstream dependencies and downstream impacts by reviewing the Dataform compiled graph. The code repository integration means that changes are documented and peer reviewed before deployment, and can be rolled back easily if needed. Dataform "assertions" have enabled NZME analysts to quickly and easily build data quality checks into the pipelines that trigger alerts if issues are detected.

The adoption of Dataform delivered a step-change in the explainability, reliability and quality of NZME reporting and formed the foundation for a new suite of editorial reports and dashboards, ensuring that the newsroom has the information they need at their fingertips.