While foundations have played a large role in driving the movement toward measuring media impact, it would be inaccurate to describe this movement as strictly top-down. Journalists and editors are skeptical of seeing the practice of journalism through an increasingly quantitative lens—the page view being the largest example of this (the metric simply counts the number of times an article has been opened). Page views have risen to prominence because they are relatively easy to capture and compare across contexts: a news organization can quickly ascertain which stories are driving the most traffic by comparing their number of page views.
As with any metric, once success is measured in its terms, sites optimize for it. Slide shows, which are designed to generate a page view for each image, are one outgrowth of metrics dictating content and user experience. Some media outlets, such as Gawker, even incentivized their writers by paying them based on the number of page views or monthly unique visitors their articles generated25(monthly unique visitors is a derivation of a page view that accounts for multiple visits by the same readers). Others saw this shift toward metric-driven decision-making at odds with quality journalism and summarized it as “clickbait.”
The pendulum swing in the other direction started around 2012 when newsroom figures like Greg Linch, an editor at The Washington Post; Aron Pilhofer, then at The New York Times; and Jonathan Stray, formerly head of Interactive News at the Associated Press, began writing about26and further discussing27alternative metrics for the newsroom.
That year, Pilhofer arranged for a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow to spend a year working on this question,28co-author of this report, Brian Abelson, looked at ways to tackle alternatives.29 Many analytics companies have also joined this conversation, oftentimes declaring the “death of the page view” in so doing.30click-driven web, companies like Chartbeat have begun developing metrics based on the time readers spend with an article, rather than the number of instances that article was viewed.31existed within most analytics platforms, its interpretation is difficult since it can be affected by a reader leaving the page open in another tab. “Attention minutes” seek to address these problems by using more sophisticated methodologies to track when a reader is actually engaging with content.32Upworthy, and Medium have openly stated that they now prefer attention minutes over page views when it comes to measuring and reporting the success of their content.
However, despite the promise of attention minutes in better aligning the interests of publishers and advertisers, the metric offers little help for truly measuring impact. In an online forum MIP hosted to discuss the relative merits of the metric, Jonathan Stray pointedly asked, “journalism is very much a multi-stakeholder endeavor, so why should we imagine that a single number can capture all aspects of the activity?” In other words, the challenge of measuring impact will not be properly addressed by a single metric. We might even argue that the negative externalities similar to those generated by page views will simply take on new forms in a media landscape dominated by attention minutes. Ultimately, the problem is not the shortcomings of particular metrics—in many ways metrics have greatly improved in recent years. The problem of metrics lies in optimizing newsrooms’ activities around a single figure above all others. Any metric given absolute primacy has the power to overemphasize certain areas and deemphasize others. One of the goals of this research is to add comparison points and context wherever possible to give the most holistic view of the metrics currently monitored—whether they be quantitative or qualitative indicators.