Joel Achenbach does a fine job of educating us fellow journalists and the public. Primarily, he brings out that views on a webpage should not be measured to determine the quality of an article. He discusses different reasons why view counts are so skewed.
Often website owners will have one page linked to another. Achenbach also points out that when a page is refreshed the count goes up. Occasionally pages will connect to more than one page, which makes that second page receive counts as well. Although a million views can’t be fabricated, we must realize that not all of these views were purposeful.
Because of this, he believes that people should not focus so much on the views of the page, but rather on the content. Just because a certain article has received thousands of views, does not mean that it is better quality than the alternate article that has 25 views.
I couldn’t agree more. As humorous as his article was, Achenbach really brings out some important flaws in online journalism.
Leave a response
You must be logged in to post a comment.