Here is the dirty truth about shares on social media.  “We’ve found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading,” says Tony Haile, an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia. Put simply, people share links they don’t bother to read. But if you base the success of your website on pure traffic instead, you’ll end up with endless posts about Grumpy Cat. “If you are a slave to the numbers, then you start creating more stuff like that… and pretty soon you will have a site full of trash and salacious garbage,” says BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. So what is the answer? MIT’s Technology Review  deny their journalists access to statistics about readers and attention, because they’re concerned that it might distort their judgement about which stories to cover or how much time to devote to them. But then they have no idea what how their audience behave. The answer is a gentle blend of what’s good for numbers and what’s good for the brand. In other words, hire a great editor.

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