Newsroom managers are fighting a tough battle between the tidal wave of consumer demands for instant news and financial restrictions cutting production budgets to the bone. Digital or print, magazines are struggling to fill the gap.

The best way, especially in digital, is to drive up metrics counts. Quality content still makes the news world spin, so how do you encourage your writers to do even more? Incentivize.

Using Metrics

“Web metrics are being used by some newsrooms in evaluating the performance of editors and reporters,” says Michael Jenner, Houston Harte Chair in Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Jenner conducted a survey of more than 100 ASNE members about their use of Web metrics and found that one in five respondents reported using those figures as part of the performance evaluation of their employees.

“Your job depends on something that’s measureable like a headline or pageviews?” Jenner says. “I thought, holy cow!”

Jenner, a veteran editor at The Bakersfield Californian, says the survey indicates a shift in modern newsrooms toward metrics-based decision-making.

“As an editor, I’d be concerned about building metrics to analyze whether the quality of writing is really driving the story,” Jenner contends. “There are so many other things that can drive the numbers.”

So, can a pay-for-performance or metrics-evaluated system work?

Forbes Media thinks so. Hundreds of Forbes’ content contributors are paid in relation to their total audience size. A baseline sum is paid to the author of a story for every unique monthly visitor with payment amplified if one-time visitors shift to returning readers. The higher number of visitors, unique or repeat, the more the author is paid.

However, not all media companies find incentives-filled newsrooms appealing.

“We love data, but data isn’t used to evaluate people,” says Jimmy Soni, managing editor for The Huffington Post. “If someone is doing great Web publishing, what we like to say is, ‘We can make anything sell.’”

Soni says The Huffington Post would never employ an incentives-based payment system.

“I’m not interested in tracking someone to a number,” Soni says. “Also, we’re in a creative business and that seems to me to suck the soul out of that creative process.”

For a top social publisher like The Huffington Post digital content performance is very healthy. However, print-centric magazine publishers looking to expand in the digital space or newsrooms making the shift to an all-online format could still benefit from tying financial incentives to content output.

In the ASNE survey, 49.5 percent of respondents claimed analytics improved the journalism they produced, however only 39 percent agreed that those same analytics made their organizations more profitable.