Can Tony Haile save journalism by changing the metric? | Hacker News Reader

Can Tony Haile save journalism by changing the metric?

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31 pointsericjust7 comments

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.

http://longform.org/ is one company with a model along those lines, I think.

I'd be interested I just don't know how it would work. Most publications want you to pay them I don't know how open they'd be to a more Netflix approach. If it existed I would certainly look into it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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