The point I was trying to make is when editors have to make choices between areas to cover. As you may be aware, most traditional media outlets are becoming smaller in terms of news gathering employees. So now they sometimes need to make decisions about what areas they should be covering.

If less folks search and clicks on ads for "Cleveland education news" rather than "Cleveland crime news," one could attempt to use that data in making their decision if you had to choose between those two topics to cover. You're serving your readers and getting them information they want, rather than spending time covering a topic that won't be read by your readers. I think this would be a bad financial decision and a bad allocation of resources.

I guess I didn't make this point clearly in my quick blog post, but I'm not advocating for doing a Demand Media-style operation. What I'm advocating for is using more analytics to make your decisions in allocating diminishing resources. I think you should do that rather than just going by your gut.

As a person who's worked in the news industry for all of my short career, its tendency has been to make decisions not necessarily based on data. I'd like to change that.