At the summit, I spent one lunch session chatting with a writer who is building a health and parenting newsletter for her regional readership. “I’m creating something I really believe has value,” she told me. “But — does it? I can’t really tell.”

People were reading her newsletter; thanks to increasingly-sophisticated analytics tools, journalists and publications can tell a lot about reader behavior. Her data could tell her who was reading, what content they opened, how much of it they read, how many times, at what times of day, on what platform, and whether they passed it on to others.

But what the data wasn’t telling her was why they were reading it—and what impact, if any, it was having on them.