Media Driven by the Reader’s Benefit

If you look at Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, or similar platforms, you'll see something they have in common you won't be able to unsee: randomness. Literally, thirty random links. These platforms are optimized for novelty, like a slot machine.

Every day, first thing, most people get a blend of randomness all at once. In this high-dimensional space, you're being pulled in a bunch of different directions, not really making progress. Progress is doing some math today and doing some more math in the same area tomorrow. A little bit of compounding progress along the same direction each day adds up to something, but time spent on these sites add up to nothing.

I'm not saying they have zero value; there's some value to serendipity. You do learn the pulse of what a community is thinking. But I think we are overconsuming novelty and underconsuming purpose.

What's the good stuff? It is what helps you boost the measurable variables you care about. It’s increasing your truth, health, and wealth. It's your knowledge, your physical fitness, your bank account balance, or some combination of them.

Those are things you’d put on a personal dashboard. You should be trying to level up each day for you and your family. Then you're really making progress on these critical life variables.

Dashboards are better than newspapers. If you are in tech, the first thing you look at each work day may be a company dashboard with metrics, like sales. This is good. The first thing you look at personally each day shouldn’t be random stories someone else picked. It should be carefully selected metrics you want to improve, like your health or hobbies. A personal dashboard is a good path to disrupt newspapers.

Algorithms and incentives could surface what is important and true rather than what is popular and profitable.

What if media was designed to be driven by the reader’s benefit? What could Men's Health look like in the era of Fitbit? What would Bloomberg look like if it measured whether its content improves your portfolio over time? What if educational publishers measured whether you actually retain information over time?

This type of media has a totally opposite design goal, which is to give maximum value in a minimum amount of time.

Building the next Men's Health when all your readers have Fitbits, Apple Watches, or smart scales means you can see the cause and effect of your content. You don't just write, “Here are great abs!” You write, “Here are step-by-step instructions on how to improve your diet,” and you actually see the change in weight of your readers.

You start tracking something completely differently, which is to the reader's benefit. This is a new concept for basically all health magazines. All fitness content could immediately do this. Enough health tracking devices are out there now.

We need better metrics. You want a stream of data coming out of you. You want alerts on your blood sugar, O2 capacity—all that kind of stuff. Those are the most important metrics, right?

That is news you can use, news where the locus of control is you; you can do something about it. Imagine your personal dashboard for your own fitness, diet, and sleep, and then maybe a family dashboard.

This type of dashboard would be more useful to you than Twitter or Facebook. It would be the right app to check each day. Then, informed by your dashboard, you could take other actions. Other media you would treat as junk food.

Everything I'm describing already exists. But integrating these technologies and making the habit to check them the first thing every day is really important.