“Thing is, every friend I have who’s a journalist says the same thing — they (understandably) hate that the quality of their work is suffering under a mandate to push out shit-tons of increasingly under-resourced, faster-deadlined, less chewy material, just so their publisher can drive empty page views and compete more effectively in the race to the bottom. Because, if you’re counting on raw tonnage of page views and cheap RoN ads to keep your business afloat, you’re in for a rocky next few years.”

It’s really amazing how many people can see this, and how it seems like so few media companies can. I’m sure people within the media companies can see it, but the collective is screwed. He nails it later, saying:

“I just think it’s piss-poor judgment to pull your content out of a thriving and highly brand-aware channel that’s frequented by a lot of very influential folks…for what? So, you can hold up all that inconvenience you’ve created to demonstrate to your bean counters that no one’s getting your “content” without being programmatically annoyed?”

So, yeah. I can’t for the life of me figure out what another reason could be. It stinks that what are considered by so many people to be outstanding staples of community information are taking this approach. Right here in our town our own paper is one of the biggest offenders of the pageview philosophy described here that I’ve ever seen. It’s maddening to log onto the homepage and see attractive women in all the clickable spots while harder news is buried in a hideous scrollable feed that displaces quality content as anything new pops up.

I hope they figure it out. But they’ve been paying it lip service for several years now, and they’re also not in control of their own destiny, so I doubt it.