Hacker News Reader

I have a theory that a lot of journalists really wanted to be novelists. When they get a chance to write a long-form article they can't resist the urge to flex their stylistic muscles; "look at me, I'm a Serious Writer".

View on HN

I was talking to a journalist who worked for a major venue and the metric she cared about was number of seconds a user stayed on an article. She didn't say "this is the most important..." she just talked about it for 20 minutes and the different results from different demographics and link sources so it was quite obvious.

So that's what journalists are measured by these days apparently, how long a piece can keep the attention of a user.

Ironically she worked for what I would consider one of the best players in terms of not writing attention grabbing BS. (I won't mention which here)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com