17 February 2026 · Harriet Keene
Dwell time is not a moral score
A short service piece that solves a reader’s problem in forty seconds can be a better use of the masthead than a meandering feature that traps a cursor.
Dwell time entered many UK newsrooms as a proxy for quality. It is a proxy for time. A recipe that is cooked from, a train-strike live blog that is checked twice, and a long investigation that is read once in the evening will never share a sensible average.
When a title asks us to “improve dwell,” we ask which format is under review. For service journalism we chart task completion where the CMS can see a click on a related widget or a print button. For features we chart scroll depth and return visits over seven days. Mixing them on one ranked list punishes the service desk.
Newsletter click-through has the opposite problem. A high click on a subject line can dump people onto a page they abandon. We pair the two: subject line against on-page completion, never either number alone in a league table of writers.
Editors sometimes want a single score for a journalist. We decline that as a standing product. A confidential addendum can list pieces that under-ran their usual pattern for that byline, which is a different and narrower question.
The useful conversation is still editorial: did this piece do the job we assigned it. Charts can show whether readers behaved as if it did. They cannot tell you whether the job was worth assigning.