Chalkbeat’s MORI system has only two categories of impact. An event is evidence of “civic deliberation”—did someone talk about it or discuss the issue in some way?—or an “informed action”—did it, at least in part, bring something about? This structure was useful not only in avoiding the impact rabbit hole described above, but also in disambiguating the term “impact.” For example, some newsrooms call reader reactions or references to their work in legal proceedings “impact.” And while you could argue that the article “brought about” that citation, the state of affairs didn’t change. We felt this distinction between talk and action was an important one to standardize.
In addition to these categories, which we renamed “Citation” and “Change,” we added two more: “Achievement,” which includes articles that win an award, see record traffic, or are cited more than any other story (in effect a meta category); and “Other” to maintain the spirit that NewsLynx is an open research platform and the framework is open to evolution. If trends develop within the “Other” category the framework can and should adapt.