Totally out of the box: Make relevance a measure of journalistic quality

Ben Elowitz, an entrepreneur known for founding a retail site, has fashioned "four new rules" of quality for publishers.

His list:

• Relevance
• Make experiences, not content
• P.O.V.
• Distribution

It's a decent attempt at redefining what to measure to align the characteristics of "quality" with actions likely to lead to success. There certainly could be others.

In a previous post, Elowitz pointed to some yardsticks he says no longer work.

The way journalism quality is typically measured is by contests, usually judged by peers in the industry. In addition to the stated criteria, how the work measures up to the holy vows of journalism affects judges, it's part of their mind set.

It would be interesting to see the entries and the winners of a contest that used Elowitz's four criteria of quality and that were judged by non-journalists. It might bring some surprising results.