Business Analyst, The Huffington Post

>> My name is Trevor Gurgick. I'm a business analyst for Huffington Post, now Huff post. Basically, you know, obviously, as an analyst, you're doing things like pulling in the numbers and kind of connecting the data of the business back to the actual, you know, business objective. So it's a really wonky way of saying you're taking everything we're collecting on our consumers, and our operations, things of that nature, and turning that into, you know, usable insights for various departments. So, for me, at Huff Post, that's the product development team, and like, then helping them figure out what's going to be a better product for consumers, editorial, figuring out what might be better content to provide to our audiences, or to grow audiences. Or on the business team, maybe looking for new sponsorships, or a way to, you know, improve our ad operations and so forth. It, a lot of it's traffic patterns. And basically, you know, what are consumers clicking on, what are they seeing, what are they reading more of? There's also the opportunity of creating new ways to capture data like that, so if maybe you're posing a question to a consumer, as they're reading an article, you know, what's their response if you're surveying folks. I would say, primarily, I'm looking at trends of our numbers, when they come in, just getting a sense of, has anything changed, you know, what are people consuming. I spend a large chunk of my day taking maybe certain areas of that data and dicing that up, maybe clearing it to figure out what we actually have, what's pulling, what does it look like, and letting other teams know what we might be able to do with it, and what kind of insights we could provide. So, you know, maybe like writing a python script to pull, like the Facebook API for instance, and figure out, you know, all the video content that might have been shared or liked, or so on and so forth. So I might spend, you know, maybe an hour on that, you know, pump that through, pull out the data, and start to really dice that up and make it more, I guess, usable and insightful for the rest of the team. So technology wise, it's a combination of SQL and python, some Excel, but python being like the coding language, SQL being more like a query language to, you know, pull that data out and organize it. Definitely a lot of Microsoft Office, things of that nature, so you can package it up and present it in a more clear way to folks who don't use python and SQL.