The Metrics Trap

How to Rebuild Journalism on Scarcity, Trust, and Depth

Over the last decade, journalism has lost its way. Driven by the relentless pressure for clicks, engagement, and viral reach, the media industry has become obsessed with metrics that measure everything except the true value of news. As headlines get shorter and stories are increasingly optimized for algorithms rather than people, we have witnessed a sharp decline in public trust and a weakening of journalism's vital role in our democracy. In todays article I want to examine both the complexities behind this as well as draw a path forward.

A line angles sharply upward, announcing that a ninety-second rewrite about a celebrity divorce has found a vast audience. Beside it, the thin blue thread of a year-long investigation that barely lifts off the x-axis. Most reporters and editors know that moment of vertigo, the instant when the numbers whisper that rigor, depth and scepticism are luxuries while provocation is a growth strategy.

In 2024 YouTube documentarian Johnny Harris remarked that “everyone in media, from YouTubers to traditional news networks, follows the same rules — click-through rate and average view duration,” a standardized scoreboard that ends up determining “what stories we can tell” [Source]. No newsroom was ever neutral about audience; but sometime in the past fifteen years the scoreboard became the game itself.

I. The Tyranny of the Algorithm

Metrics were not smuggled into journalism by saboteurs. They were welcomed as proof of relevance in a time of declining subscriptions. “The demand for measured accountability waxes as trust wanes,” business historian Jerry Muller writes in his book ‘The Tyranny of Metrics’, and trust had been leaking from legacy news not only since the rise of social media. Page-views, unique visitors, watch-time and — lately — TikTok completion rates promised an orderly market in which a story’s value appeared in real time. Yet this dashboard rewards heat over light. Former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris argues that social platforms “took journalism and media and completely warped it into the clicking economy” [Source]. But the algorithm cannot weigh civic worth; it recognises only two things: time spent and rate of clicks.

To survive in this environment, journalistic storytelling was striped from its nuance and complex ability as an organising tool for society through shared facts and realities. Instead it became a simple hammer in the toolkit, again and again following the same story frameworks to maximise attention - easy to digest, identity reinforcing, highly simplified and therefore closer to propaganda, populism and simple political messaging than true reporting of the complex shared reality that build the foundation of journalisms role in society. And with losing the nuance, reporting on those platforms, became just more “content” in direct competition with the latest viral trend. And without distinction, the understanding and trust in the journalistic process faded.

The economic logic followed. Attention is not just one resource among many; it is, neuroscientist-turned-journalism scholar Maren Urner notes, “the most valuable resource on the planet” because every other transaction must first borrow a sliver of it [Source].

In this new world, capital is created by attention, not by labour anymore. And a medium that needs attention to stay solvent will naturally privilege whatever fixes the eye fast — outrage, threat, identity affirmation. And with more rising pressure on the bottom line of most media, with every bit of losing more of its relevance, the incentives for following the mechanics of the attention economy rise. Cognitive science is frustratingly helpful here. When Amanda Ripley compared news conventions with the cognitive distortions that drive depression — catastrophising, all-or-nothing thinking — she found “every single thing on the list” [Source].

When Counting Becomes the Content

Over time the metrics did not merely shape headlines; they bent the definition of news. A three-hundred-word article was once a concession to the space of a broadsheet column. It survived into the broadband era purely because it performed. Reuters chief executive Paul Bascobert recently called the form “absurd,” noting that reporters can spend months on interviews and documents, only to be told: “great, give me six hundred words… can you get it down to three?” He now looks to AI summarisation not to replace reporters but to liberate readers from the straitjacket of the one-size-fits-all article, letting them “explore all of that work through whatever forms they want” [Source]. The irony is striking: after years spent squeezing complexity to suit the metric, experimentation is now needed simply to give the journalism back its depth.

Erosion of Authority and of Common Reality

Numbers were supposed to quantify impact; instead they measured drift. The 2024 Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that only forty per cent of respondents across forty-seven markets trust “most news most of the time”. On the American right that figure is closer to fourteen per cent [Source]. Low trust drives users toward feeds that flatter existing suspicion, which lowers trust further — a “diabolical doom loop,” Ripley warns. Cable viewers, podcast listeners and TikTok scrollers no longer imagine that they are hearing slices of a shared reality; they are choosing identity-reinforcing streams, then judging reality by how well it matches.

Chris Hayes, himself a cable anchor, argues that social platforms accelerate this confusion by blending a makeup tutorial, an arms-length conspiracy and a piece of legitimate reporting into one undifferentiated scroll, “toxic to the public sphere” in which democracy is supposed to function [Source].

What Matthew d’Ancona wrote in his book ‘Post-Truth’ of populism applies equally to metric-driven feeds: populism “simplif[ies] at all costs,” squeezing facts into a pre-ordained shape, while journalism’s duty is “to reveal complexity, nuance and paradox”. When journalism chooses the populist incentives of the feed, it abdicates its own purpose.

How the Business Collapsed While the Audience Looked Away

The damage is professional as well as civic. Simon Allison observes that “the economics of a news website don’t make any sense” anymore; on large parts of the African continent “it is almost certain to fail” as a stand-alone product [Source]. And Perry Bacon Jr. cautions in the Washington Post that profits may never return and that journalism must “focus on purpose” instead [Source].

Metrics were supposed to underwrite that purpose, but the revenue they brought was always on borrowed time, first from classified advertising, then from venture capital, then from programmatic ads that followed the audience to Facebook, then to TikTok. Each pivot to a new platform—“pivot to video,” “pivot to Facebook Live”—reset the counter, and each reset left newsrooms smaller. Artificial intelligence is merely the latest creditor at the door asking for another share.

The Flood of Slop

Just as the industry perfected its loyalty to the algorithm, the algorithm moved on. In early 2025 Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel described a new substance clogging the feeds in an article in The Atlantic: “AI slop,” “spammy and flavorless” text that “gets in everywhere and seeks the lowest level” [Source]. Google’s experimental AI Overviews can now answer many queries directly, cutting publisher traffic by “as much as seventy per cent” in some tests. 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler pictures the new competition with brutal clarity: “you’re competing against a child in Bangladesh who doesn’t care about facts… trying to match that volume is unwinnable” [Source]. And as Yuval Noah Harari pointed out: "In this competition between the truth, which is costly and complicated and sometimes painful, and fiction, which is cheap and simple, and you can make it very attractive, fiction tends to win." [Source]

The cheapness of synthetic text corrodes the very signals on which search and social once relied. If a dozen chat-bots can paraphrase your scoop before the indexer arrives, a metric built on first clicks becomes meaningless. Katie Drummond of Wired speaks of a “traffic apocalypse,” yet Wired’s own numbers remain stable precisely because it banks on “original reporting” and makes it “very clear… that this is human-led, human-generated journalism” [Source]. In other words, the scarcity has shifted from information to verification.

II. Home-Court Journalism: Reclaiming the Relationship

So, what does this leave us with? Against this backdrop different strategies are taking shape, already visible across the field in different forms, sometimes called “platform independence” but truer to call it a return to the home court. Koebler puts the credo simply: “our credibility and the trust of our audience is the only thing that separates us from anyone else… it is the only business model that works” [Source]. Instead of spraying content into an ocean of slop, outlets such as 404 Media, Defector and the non-profit Texas Tribune publish from spaces they own: an email list, a Discord server, a ticketed livestream, a pay-walled site. Attention arrives through consent, not through trick headline surgery.

Substack writers here on the platform cultivate what co-founder Chris Best calls the reader’s sense that “the media you consume shapes who you become” [Source]. Common to all is a rejection of industrial anonymity. Valérie Bélair-Gagnon calls the organising principle “humanness,” a newsroom culture that “acknowledge[s] journalists as complex people with different lived experiences” and persuades audiences through that complexity, not by hiding it [Source].

Showing the Work

Because if anonymity bred distrust, transparency can maybe help restore trust. Digital projects from The Marshall Project’s “Opening Statement” to The Guardian’s live-blog footnotes post documents, spreadsheets and code along with final text. Javaun Moradi argues that in an AI-mediated future “the underlying content will always be human auditable” [Source]. The point is not to ask every reader into the archive; it is to signal that the archive exists and that the journalist is staking professional standing on its accuracy. And Technology is not a foe here, but might help to expand the depth and complexity of original reporting again, as I mentioned above.

Louise Story, late of The Wall Street Journal, urges editors to ask how AI might “find things on the internet that would be unspottable by even the most diligent reporter” [Source]. Used openly, AI can extend a reporter’s reach — transcribing depositions, clustering thousands of documents, generating data visualisations — while leaving the framing, scepticism and accountability to humans.

As I said before, the scarcity has shifted from pure information to verification. In a world filled with overwhelming AI slop and synthetic text, being able to verify or having the trust in the journalist in verifying the information becomes ever more important. But this does not happen through 15 second TikTok reels and viral story formulas.

Making Room for Complexity Again

Longform, once dismissed as a pre-internet indulgence, has become a badge of seriousness. The popularity of podcasts and premium newsletters shows “a wake-up call for journalism,” Geetika Rudra argues. And nuanced formats “build trust by showing all sides of a story” and treat audiences “as partners, not consumers” [Source]. The stubborn metric of an hour-long listen or a six-thousand-word read might not be mass reach but dwell time and member retention, which in turn subsidise the slower beats — climate policy, corruption, rural education — that rarely trend but define a public.

Some of the most durable experiments are non-profit. The focus on “a qualitative audience” that for instance includes policymakers or urban-planners is enough to satisfy philanthropic funders [Source]. In place of CPMs, the newsroom reports impact: did the city council revise the ordinance? Did a tenant receive compensation? The measure may be soft, but it is at least aligned with journalism’s civic claim.

The New Scarcity of Trust

The very saturation of generated text makes discernment premium. Reuters believes its brand will gain value precisely because “a hallucinating chatbot” is riskier than a human-edited wire when “a lot of money” is on the line for investors or diplomats [Source]. Brands that guarantee verification will not outcompete slop on volume, but they will win in the only markets that matter: professional stakes, civic stakes and personal identity stakes.

This is not just blind optimism, but necessity. Platforms are still tilting the field; Meta’s retreat from fact-checking, noted by Kara Swisher, confirms that the largest gatekeepers prize engagement over coherence. Hany Farid in a recent TED talk therefore advised that social media, “riddled with lies and conspiracies and now AI slop,” should be treated like junk food: occasionally sampled, never mistaken for a staple [Source]. If audiences follow that counsel, the terrain will favour outlets that own their distribution, build direct relationships with their audiences as partners and rebuilds lost trust through transparency.

What Courage Looks Like Now

None of this can succeed without editorial nerve. It is easy to chase the next sugar spike of the metrics; harder to tell advertisers that the front page will lead with a housing-court brief because civic health outranks page-view forecasts. It is easy to ask reporters to adopt a chatbot that drafts copy in sixty seconds; harder to budget the extra day or week for verification and the extra paragraph for ambiguity.

Yet the hardest task may be cultural: accepting that journalism can no longer survive by looking like every other kind of “content.” As Koebler writes, “there is no reason for an individual journalist or an individual media company to make the fast food of the internet… it is impossible to make it cheaper or better” than the spam mills; “the actual pivot that is needed is one to humanity” [Source]. Amen.

III. Toward a Post-Metric Press

The numbers have not disappeared, nor should they. Revenue models still need spreadsheets; editors still need to know whether a podcast found an audience. But a newsroom that lets the line graph dictate its editorial conscience has mistaken the instrument for the music. The purpose of the press, from the colonial pamphleteers forward, has been to equip citizens to deliberate —and sometimes to dissent— on a common evidentiary ground. Trust is not an abstraction; it is demonstrable, sentence by sentence, citation by citation, in the discipline of verification and the humility of correction.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister, has experimented with online “citizen assemblies” that use structured dialogue to surface “unlikely consensus” among partisans [Source]. The method works only when participants agree on shared facts, a scarce commodity in the angrier corners of the American or European internet. Journalism’s task is to produce that commodity at scale — not viral scale, but democratic scale.

The work will be slower, more transparent, more expensive per story than the slop can ever be. It will also be, in the precise commercial sense, scarce. Scarcity is value. And value that cannot be faked by a language model or scooped by a scraper is the surest hedge a newsroom can possess.

Just as important, it is the only hedge a democracy has. A society that abandons the slow rigour of reliable reporting and science will still have information, more than it can read, but it will lack the shared map by which to navigate. Maps are judged not by their popularity but by whether they lead travelers safely home. In the future attention economy, that is the metric that matters, and it cannot be gamed. Each piece of journalism either clarifies the map or clutters it. The question is, which role we want to play.

The choice is therefore stark and simple. We can continue to harvest clicks in the shadow of algorithms that have no stake in truth and no loyalty to craft —and watch both journalism and polity wither. Or we can meet readers on our own ground, reveal our methods, honour complexity, and build, story by painstaking story, the trust that machines cannot forge.

The future of the press will not be measured in viral metrics but in whether citizens can once again say, to borrow Lincoln’s phrase, “we are not enemies, but friends.” That is the assignment.