The "metrics lag" you are describing is a kind of slack that occurs across industries. And, there is always someone who comes in, and often makes their career, by finding a new way to measure that is more precise or closer to real time-- basically they claim, "if this strategy worked for us before then just speeding up the whole process will make it better". But this is often false. That slack in the system is what lazy people use to relax until they make a move or coast into retirement. But its also what smart and productive people use to do things that the system would not have allowed otherwise.
People should stop following particular sources and start following individuals- reporters they can trust to uncover lies, tell the truth, and hit the street looking for a new job when their paper becomes "Rupert Murdoch's The Wall Street Journal" and "The Washington Post brought to you by Jeff Bezos".
There are good individuals whose names we have to become familiar with, whose careers we should follow, and whose work we should read.
But if you do want to talk about individual sources, there are still good ones out there-- theintercept.com, propublica.org, financial times, smaller guys like www.tampabay.com and civilbeat.com
It's usually leaders in the industry that make good use of metrics, not followers. Reason being is that followers often try to emulate a process they have no working knowledge of, so their measurements and actionables become cosmetic. Case in point, in Baltimore, part of the Compstat system measured health of neighborhoods by counting how many basketball courts had hoop nets. It was a pretty good way to tell what was neglected and where to turn attention to.
Within years, people tasked with making actual improvements started gaming the system and driving around and installing basketball hoop nets in community courts. Let that sink in for a minute.
So yeah, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Even having all the right information in the universe, a person can still make the wrong decisions. You are right about that. If I had all the time to explain my POV, I want to tell you that metrics aren't numbers, they're patterns. Anyone looking at them as numbers is doing it wrong.
The metrics lag is just one problem with measurements I pointed out because there's not enough time and space in the universe to describe them all. I want to say that a higher sampling speed is always better pretty much everywhere, from SCADA systems in the power industry switching to synchrophasors, to news agencies observing metrics patterns on a daily basis, to cameras recording more frames.
Here's why- there are some things you can only tell by observing metrics regularly, meaning daily if not hourly because sometimes it's just passive information. From it we could tell when Libya unplugged from the internet back at the onset of the Arab Spring- that was a big deal. They just went dark instantly, overnight. We could tell when Google+ launched and the Chinese government censors forgot to block ipv6 addresses to it for a few days/weeks and we got unfiltered web traffic from China for a time. We used metrics to make staff shift adjustments because our Asian audiences woke up when our guys went home and the readers didn't want yesterday's news today.
There was a particular lead poisoning story that did very well and got tons of traffic. However, the traffic sources were viral. If you took the time to exclude non-local traffic, the pageviews were pitiful. It meant that the local community took no notice of it and we failed to bring the issue to attention of officials in our own back yard.
Steering my rant toward my original point. The leaders that make good use of metrics might just be Besos and WaPo. Reason being is that while metrics are highly coveted in new media agencies, traditional news agencies have never taken it seriously enough for decision making. To do that, you have to formally tie numbers and methodology to performance evaluation, and that's a huge step. Fighting local print guilds to make that happen is a herculean task.
People should stop following particular sources and start following individuals- reporters they can trust to uncover lies, tell the truth, and hit the street looking for a new job when their paper becomes "Rupert Murdoch's The Wall Street Journal" and "The Washington Post brought to you by Jeff Bezos".
There are good individuals whose names we have to become familiar with, whose careers we should follow, and whose work we should read.
But if you do want to talk about individual sources, there are still good ones out there-- theintercept.com, propublica.org, financial times, smaller guys like www.tampabay.com and civilbeat.com