Writing in the Internet Age: Quantify Yor Skills

Want to get a job as a writer in the Internet Age?

Katherine Power

Here's what one potential employer, Katherine Power, chief executive of Clique Media Group, a media and marketing agency, wants to see:

"I look for people who can quantify their value, who can really think like an entrepreneur and put a value around their skill set and growth. So if you look at a resume of someone who was a lifestyle writer for XYZ publication, I like to see that they wrote 16 pieces of content per week resulting in X percent growth in page views over three months," she told The New York Times in a "Business Day" interview.

There you have it: ever-increasing page views -- a metric that would leave me, well, unemployable!

What's so significant about page views, anyway? We've all had the experience of mistakenly clicking on a link (sometimes the placement makes it all but unavoidable) and immediately fighting our way back, or being successfully baited to view a page only to be annoyed to discover it contains nothing we want.  Perhaps, for instance, some really bad content.

The answer, I think, is that page views are measurable and this is the age of Big Data. If you can measure something, it is deemed relevant. If you can't, forget it.

In contrast, what I personally find of merit in writers is rarely measurable.

Once, when dinosaurs roamed the earth ...

(Note: I have had to delete the links to Katherine Power and Clique Media Group because they became invalid over time,)