Ian Shapira at The Washington Post recently published an amazing editorial titled, The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition). Basically he recounts how, initially, he was excited when Gawker excerpted one of his stories and then he began to feel outraged.
One quote really jumped out at me, which I excerpted in the headline. shapira took the gawker story to a copywrite lawyer, who told him, “This is what in our opinion is a huge contributor to the demise of those who are originating news reports. If you don’t change the law to stop this, originators of news reports cannot survive.”
He went on to detail the amount of work it takes to complete one, 1,500 word news article. This got me thinking, so I looked at a 2,000 word article on apparel trends at OR that Tom Ryan and I just completed in this week’s BOSS Report (Tom did 90% of this work and certainly deserves at least that miuch credit).
Here’s the run down:
- Background information from seven different press releases (10 min each – easy work = 1 hour)
- Interviews with 18 different marketing folks and apparel designers (30-45 min each + prep time = 10+ hours)
- Columbia IR Presentation (2 hours)
- Transcribing or reading interviews & presentations (4+ hours)
- Writing (3 hours)
- Editing (1 hour)
- Follow up questions with additional sources (1 hour)
- Fact checking (2 hours)
Total = 24+ hours
Yes, this was the most labor-intensive article we published this week, but at the same time, this is what it takes to write just one of the articles in The B.O.S.S. Report or Sports Executive Weekly. Some of the deeper financial articles take even more time, especially when we conduct our own research with our sister companies SportScanINFO or SOS Research.
I completely understand why Mr. Shapira would feel some outrage.
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