Someone I do not know said that the best things in life are not things. A book I read recently told me something similar by advising me not to invest my leisure time in things but in experiences. Things come and go, they deteriorate, they make you suffer, especially if they are very expensive and demand a lot of maintenance and attention, but experiences leave indelible marks in the memories of those who live them.
This applies to companies as well. A few years ago, an erudite and seasoned opinion was enough to justify any effort or investment. If things then went wrong, another screw up by the boss and back to rowing. This is obviously indefensible.
Nowadays everything is measured, or at least that is the aim, and what cannot be measured is ignored, it does not matter, it is an expense. Technology, the Internet, has led us to think that if an action does not yield something tangible (a thing), if it does not produce a click or a sale, it is a waste of time and money (the matter of data quality is a separate issue). Thinking that everything is perfectly measurable is also indefensible.
I do not want to deliver a fiery and resolute defense of intangibles here today, but rather to propose the middle path. If anyone ever fascinated us with the way he ran companies it was Steve Jobs and he did not rely on mathematics, he was far more interested in typography, design and beauty. Right?
We have to measure, but we also have to leave room for creativity and inspiration, always with accountability of course. Sometimes you have to create products or designs simply because, without data, you believe they will leave a powerful impression on the audience.
I have never had pets nor do I like them much, yet I had a rather strange fondness for César Millán’s The Dog Whisperer. This good man recounted that when he started very young in a dog grooming salon his boss told him to wash and groom dogs at top speed, as the canons of capitalism demand, without paying too much attention to the animal’s wellbeing.
Well then, given his love for animals, he decided he could not treat all dogs like things, but he could not disobey his boss either, so he chose to wash one dog quickly and the next properly (which required noticeably more time until the animal lost fear and anxiety) and so on.
My proposal is that you do the same with your journalistic work, produce some articles to feed the empire of the digital monopoly to see if you get decent traffic (preferably using generative AI to avoid wasting too much time, because in reality almost nobody reads on the Internet, at most they scan) and produce others properly, with quality, for journalistic pleasure, without worrying too much about traffic but still measuring and drawing conclusions.
Take your time to gather high quality, original information, and present it with a groundbreaking design even if it does not quite meet Core Web Vitals. Please yourself for the love of journalism, enjoy, inform with passion and quality, and readers will notice it, or so I prefer to think. This article, in fact, was produced under these parameters.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with chatGPT and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
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