For many years at the Guardian we have been looking at how long our readers spend with our journalism. While the number of clicks on an article can help us understand the possible importance or popularity of an article on a given topic, it’s just as important for us to get a sense of the quality of a piece and the time readers spend with it can help us gauge that.
Along with many other sites, the Guardian has for a long time shown readers the pieces other people are clicking on in the form of a “Most viewed” list. But these lists often don’t include wonderful journalism on topics more off the beaten track. The “Deeply read” list uses attention time to surface a wider range of journalism that other readers are spending more time with. It appears on our regionalised home pages and reflects the interests of the region’s audience.
Not all of these pieces are long. To power the list we created a metric that looks at the attention time from readers compared with the length of the piece. This means that the list is diverse in terms of topic, length and format.
We hope you enjoy the increased variety and depth of the pieces you find here.