In my own early career as a journalist, the value of my work was judged primarily by a pair of key statistics: the number of articles I wrote per day and the page views these attracted. My peers and I – mostly recent university graduates, badly paid and overworked – were taught to value quantity over quality, learning that what the machine of online journalism demanded was a constant churn of clickable headlines. Adapting to this pressure is something the industry as a whole still struggles with, and I personally had to unlearn many of the lessons taught by these particular metrics.
