Will The Times Pay Its Writers Based on Page Views?

At About.com, page views and unique users are part of the compensation for our guides. Not the whole compensation but it's part of it. At The Times that's not going to be the case, because quite frankly a Supreme Court reporter isn't worse than a restaurant reviewer. And a restaurant reviewer is going to get more page views. More unique users. That's just the way it is in the world. And we don't want to set our journalists in that mode.

Having said that, are we finding ways of compensating those journalists who are helping us build verticals, and deep verticals, in different ways? Something tied not to any single measure—for example not to advertising dollars, we don't want to do that—but say to the kinds of measures of usage that we’re talking about, about engagement. Sure we are looking at how to do that in such things as DealBook. And that may be something that comes from that, but that’s really about creating a site, not just being a writer.

More recently Tara Parker-Pope's health blog posts about anorexia and eating disorders received an avalanche of visits and comments. Her articles about health and food have been propelled around the web by our most emailed list, as have the columns of many of our op-ed page writers, columnists, and lead stories about the economy and the presidential campaign.