The Chartbeat Needle and the Damage Done

I can remember the moment when my life as an editor changed completely. It was in the 2000s, when I was working at Slate. It was a day just like any other when we were all given logins to a new analytical tool called Chartbeat.

I entered my password and username and was instantly smitten. Chartbeat had a beautiful dial that showed the number of visitors who were reading a piece right now. I would watch the needle fluctuate in awe. For someone like me, who fancies themselves an observer of the zeitgeist, Chartbeat was pure candy. In a deluded way, I felt like I was looking at the realtime pulse of the culture: here is what “the people” actually cared about, clicked on, and read.

The use of “metrics” was actually a controversial thing at the time. (Yes, this is true.) Many editors who ran newsrooms and magazines, and the journalists who wrote stories, were suspicious of the Internet and its attendant technologies, and they spoke of having an “instinct for story” and a “news sense” without irony. (What they were really saying is that they had taste, and taste turned out to be a fragile redoubt.)

There is a remarkable book, from 2021, that documents the clash of these sensibilities: All the News That’s Fit to Click by Caitlin Petre. It’s really just an amazing book. Petre is an ethnographer who embedded herself with Chartbeat, Gawker, and the New York Times. I love the many anthropological details she gathers, such as the nicknames that Chartbeat employees give each other: “Bones,” “DVD,” “Laser,” “Brains,” “Turbo.” Petre also explains, with scholarly precision, how Chartbeat lured journalists into a twisted game. Traffic is fun, lively, almost like an art project! What can you do to produce more of it, all the time, every day.

I soon developed the habits of an addict. I would publish a piece and then instantly fire up Chartbeat, waiting for the rush. If the mob of readers failed to show, I would start second-guessing the headline, the artwork, and even the assignment.

This was all self-chosen. I was lucky to work at places that were not ruled by analytics. (Petre documents how Gawker was warped by its open leaderboards and internal traffic competition—harrowing stuff.) Yet, even in the enlightened and reasonable environments where I plied my trade, you could not ignore the numbers. They were always there, lurking in the background—a judgement that could be rendered at any time. So of course you were influenced, you started making different decisions: “I suppose we could assign another piece on David Foster Wallace” or “It’s interesting that Starbucks is selling music, and people love to read about Starbucks.”

(Next week, I will tell part two of this story: How I almost, kind of, maybe cured myself of my numbers addiction.)