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Comment by Winst | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any idea how much it costs a traditional newspaper to produce an article like this? They've listed 15 people in the "Credits" section at the bottom. Seems cost-prohibitive.

Written by Michael Sallah, Debbie Cenziper, Steven Rich / Graphics by Ted Mellnik, Emily Chow, Laura Stanton / Photos by Michael S. Williamson / Editing by Jeff Leen, Steven Kress / Research by Jennifer Jenkins / Production by Chris George, Connor Jennings, Bronwen Latimer, Michelle Williams, Tim Wong

Edit: clarity

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True investigative journalism is a remarkably expensive process with little chance of recouping overall costs. Even after the initial draft, an extraordinary amount of fact checking and editorial requirements/standards are applied to the piece. Some of it's for reputation reasons and a lot of it is for legal reasons: slander suits aren't cheap.

I hope papers start providing full 'Credits' to what goes into a piece so as to better inform the reader how many people in the chain it takes to arrive at the final copy.

The "producers" are likely just management and several of the rest may in fact be unpaid interns trying to break into the industry.

But researched articles like this are expensive to produce. That's why PR firms are so successful. Reporters need others to find and research stories for them.

Production has a different meaning in publishing than in movies, which is what I think you're referring to.

In print, production is the act of taking the raw inputs (copy, graphics, layout) and getting it out the door. E.g., the print production managers I know manage the physical details of the print medium. There is a similar meaning in advertising. [1]

Looking at the resumes of the first couple producers, one's a designer, the other lists himself as "Nerd". So I think they are using the meaning from publishing: people who produce the final product.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_agency#Production

It took them 10 months to research this. No doubt there was a lot of effort involved.

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