Chartbeat’s first client was Time.com; its second was the Wall Street Journal. And what Chartbeat told them was discouraging. Fully half of all readers who landed on a given web page gave it less than 15 seconds before moving on. “The challenge for people writing important stories,” Haile counseled, “is to write them in a not-impenetrable way.” Don’t bury the lede, for example, but that had long been a trusted axiom; Chartbeat went further, making a case for doing away with anything that could be mistaken for background, context, or introduction.
