

Can Tony Haile save journalism by changing the metric? - ericjust
http://www.cjr.org/innovations/tony_haile_chartbeat.php

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kfk
During the last months with a smartphone and a 3g I have noticed I read more.
I spend a lot of time in the metro and I read. I read about everything, but I
enjoy in depth articles on many topics. However, I find it difficult to find
good writing or good writers, following 1 or n magazines won’t cut for me, I
rarely enjoy the full magazine, just 1 or 2 articles every few months. What I
am saying I guess is that I would really pay for somebody to pick good
articles for me. I know the internet is full of aggregators, but somehow those
are not enough. For instance, I like HN a lot, but it's focus is too narrow
sometimes.

Maybe paid article discovery could bring some revenues for magazines/writers?
I don’t see much interest in this tough.

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mattxxx
Paid article discovery seems scary... like a way to extremely narrow people's
fields of sight.

The issue seems to fundamentally be about how to pay good writers, that offer
something useful to read.

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_mhr_
Think about it this way. Perhaps a certain ratio of the articles recommended
could be "out of your comfort zone."

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jawns
In my previous job, I was a web editor at a metro daily, and I actually
developed a program that does basically the same thing as ChartBeat. It showed
real-time page view stats, overlayed on our homepage. (Headlines were all
highlighted according to how popular they were at the moment.)

The problem with making money off of digital journalism, however, is not
finding the "God metric." Even if you could pinpoint exactly how engaged each
user is at any moment, and even if you could predict each user's likelihood of
future engagement, and even if you could supply that information and more to
advertisers, it still wouldn't save journalism, because ...

DISPLAY ADVERTISING ON NEWS SITES IS NOT NEARLY AS LUCRATIVE AS PRINT
ADVERTISING USED TO BE.

Seriously, go back 20 or 30 years, and metro newspapers were raking in
extremely healthy profits off of ad sales. Because, particularly for local
businesses, there was no better place to reach a lot of eyeballs.

Nowadays, advertisers (both local and national) have gotten wise. They are
much better able to pinpoint how a particular display ad translates into
sales, and for many of them, it just isn't worth it. And even when they DO see
a decent return on investment ... they just aren't willing to commit ad
dollars to nearly the same degree that they used to.

I love journalism, and I recognize its importance to our society, but it
absolutely is not going to survive on the back of online advertising alone.

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Animats
Short version: measuring time spent with story on screen is more useful than
number of times story is viewed. This makes story content more valuable than
headlines.

