I think this has a bit to do with what a media organization's strategy is. If you're going for 'advertising supported, big pageviews', then it's critical to sha

I think this has a bit to do with what a media organization's strategy is. If you're going for 'advertising supported, big pageviews', then it's critical to share that info with writers. The logical consequence of this is buzzfeed. If your strategy is to provide a specific value to some audience, then it gets murkier. Can seeing what's popular help your editors allocate resources toward what people actually want? Sure. But it's quite possible that the boring, low pageview stories are the ones that are _useful_ to some group of people that are paying the bills by subscribing or being targeted by advertisers. People like to rag on the old media model where a patrician editor decided what was 'fit to print' and thus defined what information got published, and it's good that we're past that. But if you just go by analytics, you end up with an organization driven by lists, quizzes, shock stories and cute animals.