Chasing quality over clicks: An optimistic look at the future of journalism

March 28, 2014 Leave a comment

Chasing quality over clicks: An optimistic look at the future of journalism
BY DAVID HOLMES
ON MARCH 19, 2014
In a revealing post called “Confessions of an ex-tech journalist,” Bekah Grant, who used to write forVentureBeat, airs a number of grievances about being a tech journalist: In short, she wrote up to five stories a day, often with no time to research or call sources, all while being constantly hounded by PR pitches.

Fielding PR pitches is a part of any tech journalist’s job, but writing 5 posts a day to keep up with every funding announcement? That is a nightmare. I can also say from my experience as a “web intern” at a newspaper that the “5-posts-a-day” model is not limited to tech journalism either.
But that’s the model of ad-supported web journalism, she writes. Pageviews, pageviews, pageviews. So are young writers doomed to burn themselves out writing fast, cheap posts, without ever getting the chance to dig deep into subjects (which is probably why they became a writer in the first place)?
Not necessarily and here’s why:
We know that volume and speed can bring about lots of clicks. But increasingly there’s a tendency away from counting pageviews and toward calculating the amount of attention readers give your site.
In a very good post on the blog Stratechery, Ben Thompson explains this paradigm shift:
“Nate Silver’s manifesto for his new site is 3500 words long, meaning it would take the average adult just under 12 minutes to read. That 12 minutes is then gone forever, a bit of attention taken from whatever other activity said reader would have otherwise consumed, and instead gave to Nate Silver. That is why Nate Silver is so valuable.”
Not everyone can be Nate Silver. Nevertheless, there’s a promising trend of journalism sites chasing quality over clicks, hoping that by getting audiences to really engage and pay attention to your content (instead of just blindly clicking and sharing) they’ll also be more engaged with the advertising on the site which pays the bills. Now if advertisers can just break their reliance on the almighty pageview.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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