Reporters Need ‘Space’ (read: Freedom)

Freeing your reporters to do really good works is DOABLE. Making them write 1-2 stories (with the best quality of journalism they can possibly provide readers) is one of the tricks. Don’t require them write 6-10 stories or even 10-15 stories a day (assume they work 8 hours a day, as they have their personal lives as well). It is not I who says so but Sarah Lacy, the founder of tech blog Pando.com.

I’m not stunned. She made a point. Quality, not quantity, is what she and her team are after so it does make sense for them to do so. A reporter cannot produce a piece of high quality journalistic content within less than an hour. That’s fucking crazy. Except the reporters only need to rewrite or repurpose or ‘repackage’ or summarize various articles from several sources scattered randomly on the web. It’s fun. They only sit at the office and never get out.

She further claimed that even a junior reporter aged 19 (I guess it is Nathaniel Mott she was talking about) was able to write a complex article which was she thought interesting and showed high quality in tech journalism that Lacy complained about to be flooded with press releases rewriting and copy pasting to be the fastest news breaker recorded on TechMeme Leaderboard.

She takes journalism really seriously, and that’s ridiculously awesome. At least to me. I don’t know it is to you.