  We show that quantum-to-classical channels, i.e., quantum measurements, can
be asymptotically simulated by an amount of classical communication equal to
the quantum mutual information of the measurement, if sufficient shared
randomness is available. This result generalizes Winter's measurement
compression theorem for fixed independent and identically distributed inputs
[Winter, CMP 244 (157), 2004] to arbitrary inputs, and more importantly, it
identifies the quantum mutual information of a measurement as the information
gained by performing it, independent of the input state on which it is
performed. Our result is a generalization of the classical reverse Shannon
theorem to quantum-to-classical channels. In this sense, it can be seen as a
quantum reverse Shannon theorem for quantum-to-classical channels, but with the
entanglement assistance and quantum communication replaced by shared randomness
and classical communication, respectively. The proof is based on a novel
one-shot state merging protocol for "classically coherent states" as well as
the post-selection technique for quantum channels, and it uses techniques
developed for the quantum reverse Shannon theorem [Berta et al., CMP 306 (579),
2011].
