Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but I cannot resist to comment on that line under the headline:

> By Chris Welch, a reviewer specializing in personal audio and home theater. Since 2011, he has published nearly 6,000 articles, from breaking news and reviews to useful how-tos

So 13 years, that’s around 460 publications per year. That sounds pretty high, you would have to be writing non stop for more than a decade. I know nothing about the tech new industry but is that realistic or just a fantasy?

View on HN

A lot of "tech news" journalism is just copy pasting a press release. They might also be counting every single article they were on the byline for, but they might not have actually substantially written that much. An example is some review of the "Best Headphones" where the article is huge, but he only wrote a paragraph.

I think you might also be underestimating how easy it becomes to just churn out article after article if that's your day-job. You're not writing literature or a longform article in the New Yorker; you're just bashing out 2-4 paragraphs, then rinse and repeat all day.

Former journalist here. I worked at a business dot-com where the writers were expected to churn out at least 5 market briefs a day, and the majority of them did more. I also worked at a daily newspaper where it wasn't uncommon for me to write 8-10 news briefs a day, but they were largely just rehashing police reports or otherwise summarizing content that was already in front of me (as opposed to doing boots-on-the-ground reporting).

I dont know if i would call something like this[1] an article. Taking a bus ad and writing a few sentences about it. He seems great at copy pasting promotional emails he gets I guess

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/28/10674048/verizon-will-pa...

A "publication"in the digital media space includes 200 word blog posts, many of which simply link to other blog posts for the details.

In any case, the "website writer" jobs are known for overwork and low pay, so these numbers are par for the course.

Do tweets of a certain length qualify?

A lot of blog post content gets repurposed as tweets, so it would be the other way around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com