The making of a superstar business journalist

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about how business journalists will be considered superstars in the future based on data.

Dvorkin writes, “For December 2014, I took a look at Moat’s numbers for Matt Herper, our highly respected pharma reporter. His individual posts (I stopped counting at 500 viewed for that month) had an average page dwell time of 122 seconds and total active page dwell time of 23,150 hours (Matt’s in the Business channel, which clocked 293,000 hours of dwell time). Readers scrolled on 88% of his post pages. The average scroll depth on Matt’s pages was almost 66.8%, with his cancer drug stories getting 75% scroll depth. Then I took a look at one of our technology contributors, Gordon Kelly. His average page dwell time: 78.5 seconds. Total page dwell time: 49,500 hours (he a lot more page views than Matt that month); Nearly 90% of readers scrolled his pages and the average scroll depth was 63%.

“So, Super Journalists produce, market and promote their posts. They cultivate a loyal community that shares and like their posts. Their stories get read for long periods of Internet time. Now, they should get rewarded for those stories that run ads that are seen for long periods of time, which ultimately means higher CPMs for publishers. Although it would be complicated, I can envision the day at FORBES when we adjust out incentive-based payment plan to reward such Super Journalists for posts with longer reading times. Salaried staffers might participate, too.

“Please, I can already hear the bellowing from the usual suspects: journalists are above all that! Really, now. Magazine editors frequently received bonuses based on newsstand sales, now other metrics since that business soured. Their direct reports get bonuses based on various targets, too, especially if they have digital responsibilities. What about the reporters who do the hard work that editors benefit from? You guessed it — they make a only a salary. Newspapers are little different. Not being editors back then,  Woodward and Bernstein cashed in outside the newsroom — a blockbuster book and movie. Somehow none of that windfall compromised their integrity in the years after nor stopped them from doing more great journalism.”

Read more here.