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to see how many people click on their stories. This isn’t just a rule, it’s a philosophy that the Times lives by: The point of being the newspaper of record is to provide readers with the benefit of excellent, considered editorial judgment. “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play,” New York Times editor Bill Keller said, “because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’ ” Readers can vote with their feet by subscribing to another paper if they like, but the Times doesn’t pander. Younger Times writers who are concerned about such things have to essentially bribe the paper’s system administrators to give them a peek at their stats. (The paper does use aggregate statistics to determine which online features to expand or cut.)

If the Internet’s current structures mostly tend toward fragmentation and local homogeneity, there is one exception: The only thing that’s better than providing articles that are relevant to you is providing articles that are relevant to everyone. Traffic watching is a new addiction for bloggers and managers—and as more sites publish their most-popular lists, readers can join in the fun too.

Of course, journalistic traffic chasing isn’t exactly a new phenomenon: Since the 1800s, papers have boosted their circulations with sensational reports. Joseph Pulitzer, in honor of whom the eponymous prizes are awarded each year, was a pioneer of using scandal, sex, fearmongering, and innuendo to drive sales.

But the Internet adds a new level of sophistication and granularity to the pursuit. Now the Huffington Post can put an article on its front page and know within minutes whether it’s trending viral; if it is, the editors can kick it by promoting it more heavily. The dashboard that allows editors to watch how stories are doing is considered the crown jewel of the enterprise. Associated Content pays an army of online contributors small amounts to troll search queries and write pages that answer the most common questions; those whose pages see a lot of traffic share in the advertising revenue. Sites like Digg and Reddit attempt to turn the whole Internet into a most-popular list with increasing sophistication, by allowing users to vote submitted articles from throughout the Web onto the site’s front page. Reddit’s algorithm even has a kind of physics built into it so that articles that don’t receive a constant amount of approval will begin to fade, and its front page mixes the articles the group thinks are most important with your personal preferences and behavior—a marriage of the filter bubble and the most-popular list.

Las Últimas Noticias, a major paper in Chile, began basing its content entirely on what readers clicked on in 2004: Stories with lots of clicks got follow-ups, and stories with no clicks got killed. The reporters don’t have beats anymore—they just try to gin up stories that will get clicks.

At Yahoo’s popular Upshot news blog, a team of editors mine the data produced by streams of search queries to see what terms people are interested in, in real time. Then they produce articles responsive to those queries: When a lot of people search for “Obama’s birthday,” Upshot produces an article in response, and soon the searchers are landing on a Yahoo page and seeing Yahoo advertising. “We feel like the differentiator here, what separates us from a lot of our competitors is our ability to aggregate all this data,” the vice president of Yahoo Media told the New York Times. “This idea of creating content in response to audience insight and audience needs is one component of the strategy, but it’s a big component.”

And what tops the traffic charts? “If it bleeds, it leads” is one of the few news maxims that has continued into the new era. Obviously, what’s popular differs among audiences: A study of the Times’s most-popular list found that articles that touched on Judaism were often forwarded, presumably due to the Times’s readership. In addition, the study concluded, “more practically useful, surprising, affect-laden, and