Page-view journalism: a slippery slope?

The issue of measuring journalist performance has been bubbling around newsrooms since the dawn of the page view. The topic came to the surface again today when The New York Times reported that diminished web traffic was part of the reason the Washington Post did not renew the contract of political columnist Dan Froomkin.
 
Andrew Alexander, the Post’s ombudsman, concluded that reduced traffic “played a big role” in the Post’s decision. Froomkin told Alexander that he attributed much of the drop-off to poor promotion and the decision to change from a column format to a blog. “I felt that with adequate promotion, page views would have been much higher,” he told Alexander.
 
Measuring a writer’s performance based on the traffic their stories get is not new. Compensating them (or, in the case of Froomkin, firing them) based on the numbers is a more recent trend. Niemen Journalism Lab reported last week that Gawker.com was reinstating a model to pay bonuses to writers based on page views. Writers receive base compensation plus a monthly page view target; bonuses kick in as the writer surpasses those targets by certain percentages.
 
It’s not that writers don’t want to be judged on their work. It’s just that they tend to have different opinions about what constitutes valuable performance. Like the ability to uncover new and useful information. Or the quality of writing. Unfortunately, those soft metrics don’t cut it in today’s digital world. Performance-based journalism – based on page views, comments, or inbound links – isn’t going away.
 
The problem with this model is that certain topics will always skew page view results. Like Michael Jackson. Or Paris Hilton. In tech, it’s Microsoft, Apple, or the Linux operating system. In sports, it’s A-Rod or Tiger. If you’re the poor cub reporter who has the town hall beat, it will be hard to drive up your traffic numbers unless you dig up a scandal involving a councilor and a farm animal.
 
Many journalists worry that the quest for page views ultimately skews coverage toward sensationalist topics (“Kim Jong Il has pancreatic cancer!”) or quick-hit lists (The Celebrity 100!) and away from the kind of deeper, thought-provoking investigative pieces that don’t always translate to heavy traffic volumes. Worse, some journalists fear that an emphasis on page views to determine coverage and placement ultimately puts the power of editorial decisions in the hands of the business side of the house.
 
That’s a chilling thought for long-time journalists like David Rosenbaum, an editorial consultant and the former editor of CIO magazine. “While one might argue that publishers are simply giving the readership what it wants,” he told me in an email, “the truth is they're now exerting the kind of control over their publications they've always wanted and were heretofore prevented from having by editors who were trained to evaluate the audience, the publication's subject matter and its writers and make decisions based on quality and good journalism. Publishers can't and won't do that because they don't know or care about either; they know and care about ad sales, page views, unique visitors, impressions, and the bottom line.”