• Knight Digital Media Center, Friday, October 23, 2009 9:45 AM

Slate editor David Plotz offers a fresh glimpse of the future of newspapers and magazine Web sites. More sophisticated ways of measuring usership and engagement will change advertisers focus from a mass audience to focus on loyal, engaged users who want quality, long form journalism, he says.

"The one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader. The person who makes a commitment to your [media] brand... if you can get those readers, a smaller set of readers, who come to you three or five or 10 times a week, you don't have to go after that huge other set of readers."

Plotz says advertisers have begun to sponsor specific projects at Slate and the projects are paying for themselves. "Advertisers want to be around some ambitious project more than they want to be around some snarky political column," he says.

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