Long-term planning has never been a strong suit for newspaper management.  To be fair, you could say short-term thinking is entirely understandable these days given that newspapers are in a day-to-day battle for survival.  Understandable, but still not the right approach.  “Short-termism” has led to, among other things, a narrow focus on cost-cutting to the detriment of innovation.

Add to this a temptation created by newspapers’ nemesis, the Internet.  Paradoxically, Web metrics have the potential to push newspapers even more toward short-term thinking and a TV news-like approach to evaluating content and its creators.  I’m talking about ratings and about getting rid of reporters or columnists because last week their clicks went down.  This is what may have happened to Dan Froomkin, whose contract wasn’t renewed by the Washington Post.  Web traffic to his column, White House Watch, had dropped, and the New York Times quotes the Post’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, as saying, “reduced traffic played a big role” in dumping Froomkin.  Froomkin was soon hired by the Huffington Post.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with newspaper management looking at readership of particular pieces of content as one element of a broader evaluation of what works and what doesn’t for the paper and what does or doesn’t fit into the organization’s mission.  But just looking at clicks or page views, i.e. ratings, is a lazy path to irrelevance.  Mark Glaser, executive editor of PBS MediaShift, says it well in the New York Times article:

“Raw traffic numbers should not be the only gauge of a writer’s work,” Mr. Glaser said in an e-mail message. “I would also look at the quality of the work, whether they’ve broken important news, whether they provide a certain voice for the publication, whether they have a loyal audience that returns often and comments more, whether they are the start of other conversations on other blogs and forums.”