I was talking to a journalist who worked for a major venue and the metric she cared about was number of seconds a user stayed on an article. She didn't say "this is the most important..." she just talked about it for 20 minutes and the different results from different demographics and link sources so it was quite obvious.

So that's what journalists are measured by these days apparently, how long a piece can keep the attention of a user.

Ironically she worked for what I would consider one of the best players in terms of not writing attention grabbing BS. (I won't mention which here)