The End of the Days of Unread Copy

My pal Mike Crowley’s (good!) New Republic piece on Hillary’s tough press operation is drawing lots of attention from the blogosphere. It’s a reminder that the subject hacks and bloggers like best is, well, stories about hacks and bloggers. I daresay it’s doing wonders for TNR’s web traffic today. Which reminds me that this ability to see and measure what people are reading in real time is going to have an enormous impact on journalism in the future. I’m not sure people – readers and hacks alike – necessarily fully appreciate that yet.

In the past newspaper management have relied upon focus groups and reader surveys to find out what folk actually like. But of course, readers lie: they will claim that they read all the meaty foreign coverage and the editorials and the reporting on legal matters and all the rest of it. But most of them don’t. They like the idea of this stuff but they can’t stir themselves to actually read it.