Time Inc. Spreadsheet Measures How Valuable Reporters Are to Advertisers

Time Inc. Spreadsheet Measures How Valuable Reporters Are to Advertisers

This story was originally published by

The old 'church and state' relationship between advertising and editorial is a thing of the past but has Time Inc gone too far ranking its reporters based on their value to advertisers?




If you’re a writer at a cash-starved, advertiser-neglected publication that’s a shell of what it aspired to be 20 years ago, you know — good or bad — that you’re being judged on more than just your writing quality.

But usually, employers are more subtle about what exactly constitutes job performance than the good folks over at Time Inc.

Instead of quietly discussing how post popularity squared with writer quality and other factors, the company decided to put it all in a spreadsheet. Because if there’s one thing we know, those things never get leaked …

Thanks to Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, we can see that the company recently assigned writers a rating from 2 to 10 in each of several categories, including productivity, writing quality, social media reach, and … a certain category in column J explicitly described as, “Produces content that [is] beneficial to advertiser relationship.”

Read the full piece here.




Please login with linkedin to comment

Burlington socks Health Insurance Tim Devine YouTube

Latest News

Sydney Comedy Festival: Taking The City & Social Media By Storm
  • Media

Sydney Comedy Festival: Taking The City & Social Media By Storm

Sydney Comedy Festival 2024 is live and ready to rumble, showing the best of international and homegrown talent at a host of venues around town. As usual, it’s hot on the heels of its big sister, the giant that is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, picking up some acts as they continue on their own […]

Global Marketers Descend For AANA’s RESET For Growth
  • Advertising

Global Marketers Descend For AANA’s RESET For Growth

The Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) has announced the final epic lineup of local and global marketing powerhouses for RESET for Growth 2024. Lead image: Josh Faulks, chief executive officer, AANA  Back in 2000, a woman with no business experience opened her first juice bar in Adelaide. The idea was brilliantly simple: make healthy […]