Can Tony Haile save journalism by changing the metric?

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&#x27;s focus is too narrow sometimes.<p>Maybe paid article discovery could bring some revenues for magazines&#x2F;writers? I don’t see much interest in this tough.

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.)<p>The problem with making money off of digital journalism, however, is not finding the &quot;God metric.&quot; Even if you could pinpoint exactly how engaged each user is at any moment, and even if you could predict each user&#x27;s likelihood of future engagement, and even if you could supply that information and more to advertisers, it still wouldn&#x27;t save journalism, because ...<p>DISPLAY ADVERTISING ON NEWS SITES IS NOT NEARLY AS LUCRATIVE AS PRINT ADVERTISING USED TO BE.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t worth it. And even when they DO see a decent return on investment ... they just aren&#x27;t willing to commit ad dollars to nearly the same degree that they used to.<p>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.