I traveled to Japan with a TRS-80 portable computer, which ran on AA batteries and had plastic cups to put over the phone receiver. It transmitted copy at the blistering speed of 300 bits per second. And I wrote about Mexico’s tequila crisis of 1994 without the benefit of a full set of Mexican financial statistics a few clicks away.

From my perspective, the evolution of the tools of journalism between then and now has been nothing less than breathtaking.

Articles are more thorough — informed by complementary data and analysis, enriched with links to things like interactive charts, videos and slide shows. They get to readers much more quickly. Most important, they reach many more of them.

For all its financial troubles, never has The New York Times been read by more people: 44 million unique viewers online in the United States every month. Yet if you were to rummage through American economic statistics you would find little evidence of journalism’s technological leaps. Measured by its contribution to gross domestic product, the most prominent indicator of the nation’s economic well-being, much of this new journalistic value enabled by information technology is not worth much.

This is true not only of journalism. The failure of I.T. to deliver measurable value has been a popular meme among economists for years. Back in 1987 Nobel laureate Robert Solow posed a now famous paradox: “We can see the computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

The meme is back. The burst of productivity during the dot-com revolution of the 1990s gave skeptics pause. But as productivity has slowed substantially in recent years, doubts have re-emerged about whether information technology can power economic growth like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine did in the past.

Last year, Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University proposed that the I.T. revolution has pretty much exhausted its promise. He asked, provocatively: “Is U.S. economic growth over?” And he forecast stagnating living standards for the vast majority of Americans for decades to come.

Government statistics lend support to his skepticism: Value added by the information technology and communications industries — mostly hardware and software — has remained stuck at around 4 percent of the nation’s economic output for the last quarter century.

But these statistics do not tell the whole story. Because they miss much of what technology does for people’s well-being.

News organizations that take advantage of computers to let go of journalists, secretaries and research assistants will show up in the economic statistics as more productive, making more with less. But statisticians have no way to value more thorough, useful, fact-dense articles.

What’s more, gross domestic product only values the goods and services people pay for. It does not capture the value to consumers of economic improvements that are given away free. And until recently this is what news media organizations like The New York Times were doing online.

The Commerce Department is in the process of revising the way it measures G.D.P. to take better account of the contributions of investment in research and development and artistic creation. But even though the revisions to be announced this summer are expected to make the economy look bigger, they are not devised to capture the value that Americans get from digital technologies.

“G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers,” said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.”

G.D.P. misses what Americans gain from sharing information on Facebook or finding information on Google or Wikipedia. It misses how dating sites reduce the cost and increase the odds of finding a mate. It misses the time saved by drivers who use Google Maps and the time gained by consumers from shopping online. Measured in money — what it contributes to G.D.P. — the recording industry is shrinking. Yet never before have Americans had access to so much music.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @portereduardo

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/business/statistics-miss-the-benefits-of-technology.html?partner=rss&emc=rss