Philip: "If that’s the case, then traditional publishers are swimming in a sea of meaningless metrics when it comes to looking at their online “reach,” “engagement,” and so on."

Me: Yes, exactly! We are being beguiled by numerosity without significance. And unfortunately, the latest generation of social media tools seem to be leading us to an ever-shallower stats obsession.

Personally, when I look at content-centric site stats, I'm interested in page views + visits, RSS subscribers (if there is a full-text feed, otherwise, engagement (reading) only shows up in page views), email clickthroughs, comment volume, inbound links.

I think that inbound referrals from facebook, twitter, etc are interesting to track.

HTH.