Publishing Can’t Quit Its Obsession with Buzzy Stories

IS COBALT BUZZY? Would you read a carefully reported, compact but spirited essay about Canada’s rising strategic value in a resource-hungry world? No? Well, a lot of you did. A few months ago, Christopher Pollon’s “The US Badly Needs Rare Minerals and Fresh Water. Guess Who Has Them?” drew 150,000 readers in two days.

What made us think anyone would be interested? The answer is rarely simple. We constantly sift through news, linking trends, scouring reports, going yes, no, maybe. That’s how we ended up emailing Pollon, a Vancouver-based journalist with deep knowledge of the mining sector. Could Trump’s obsession with critical minerals illuminate his annexation talk about Canada? (Spoiler: yes.) But discerning, synthesizing, and connecting explains only part of how we decide. Each judgment call is also a negotiation: between resources and ambition, urgency and priorities. Budgets are blunt instruments. To pay for one story means turning down another.

These trade-offs are, in turn, tied to the key, if even trickier to define, idea of taste. Our choices embody our newsroom. They express our convictions, our frustrations, the lazy assumptions we want to counter. Editorial judgment is identity. It declares what we stand for.

• You Can’t Always Measure the Impact of Journalism in Clicks
• You Can’t Hook Readers If You Don’t Trust Their Intelligence
• We Can Still Make Works of Deep Value at a Time of Shallow Resources

What do we stand for? The real question is: Would we have been proud of Pollon’s piece had it attracted a third of the views? Or scarcely any? Readers don’t always show up in force. But if we let those moments shape our commissioning, we might pass up stories about climate change, or avoid literary criticism, or shy away from certain kinds of urban policy. These subjects are hardly click drivers. We cover them because we believe we need to. Sometimes they connect. Sometimes not. The Verge is unusual among publishers in keeping traffic data, according to Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel, “under lock and key”—a choice meant to keep the focus on stories that feel worth telling. I admire that.

That tension—between chasing what performs and backing what matters—has been on my mind since reading Tajja Isen’s sensational feature, which appears in this issue, on how the unhealthy obsession with an author’s sales history, or “track,” leaves little oxygen for anything eccentric or truly new. Publishing, argues Isen, was once an industry that offered room for experimentation and long bets; now it’s haunted by the tyranny of short-term judgment.

That lesson applies just as much to us. Our analytics dashboard—which, among other boons, offers real-time stats on how much time readers spend with a story, the area where they live, and how they came to the page—is a powerful tool. It has made us better editors by steering our decisions toward subjects readers appreciate. But if followed slavishly, it can narrow creative possibilities. Too quickly stigmatizing “underperforming” stories lowers the tolerance for risk and failure—whether that means commissioning a complex investigation, betting on an emerging writer, or testing a new form. Our job is not just to meet expectations but to create them. Like good conversation, where we veer may surprise you, and that’s the point.