Amara Lindqvist leads product at Baltic Morning, a regional publisher with seven daily titles. She speaks on Friday afternoon in the Belém room. We talked to her about what happened when her titles let readers ask questions on the page.
What did you expect when you launched?
"We expected people to ask about the news. They did, but the most common questions were practical: when does the road reopen, where is the polling station, what time does the match start. Readers treat the page as a place to get something done."
How do you keep answers accurate?
"The assistant only answers from our own published reporting, and it says which article an answer comes from. When a story is corrected, the correction is what the assistant uses from that minute on. That rule took longer to build than anything else, and it matters more than anything else."
What surprised you?
"How much the editors liked the question log. Every morning the night editor reads the questions nobody could answer. Twice that log turned into a story before any other outlet had it."
What will you talk about in Lisbon?
"Mistakes, mostly. We launched on a sports site first, and it turned out sports readers ask very fast questions during live games. I will show what we changed, and the three numbers we now look at every week."
Amara Lindqvist speaks on Friday 13 November at 14:00 in the Belém room. The session is not recorded, so be there.