For the first time in its history, the editors at The New Yorker know which articles are being read. And they know who's reading them.
They know if the cartoons are the only thing people are reading, or if the fiction really is a backwater. They know when people abandon articles, and they know that the last 3,000 words of a feature on the origin of sand is being widely ignored.
They also know, or should know, whether people are looking at the ads, and what the correlation is between ad lookers and article readers. The iPad app can keep track of all of this, of course.
The question then: should they change? Should the behavior of readers dictate what they publish?
Of course, this choice extends to what you publish as well, doesn't it?
Published on September 01, 2011 02:01