Sam Zell, the 52nd-richest man in America and the sometimes-fun crazy man who owns Tribune Company (in partnership with his employees, except they don't have much say!), has introduced an exciting new metric in evaluating newspaper performance. The company's C.O.O. announced yesterday that they had begun to measure journalist's output in pages produced per year. Reporters at the Los Angeles Times, he told analysts, produce on average 51 pages a year. Why, that's just one page a week. So! I hear that layoffs in the LA Times editorial department will number around 120. This comes after last year's buyouts, which took the editorial staff down to about 850 people.

LA Observed has some harsh words for Zell:

The Zell long-range model now looks to be less content and less exclusive content, with less depth to that content, produced by less experienced people and delivered to readers in less attractive packages.

This metric is solely paper-based, and doesn't count web content or traffic or even the importance of stories, which seems short-sighted. Why wouldn't the business side and management judge the paper by a system that measures the impact of work produced?

Their system makes the pageview-pay system famously propagated by Nick "Daniel Pageviews" Denton and his deputy Noah "H.W. Pageviews" Robischon at Gawker Media seem future-looking, business-savvy and beneficent to employees.

(Disclosure: I am a quite happy regular freelancer for the LA Times, though I don't produce 51 pages a year there, but only because I'm not contracted to do so.)