Help Us Report: How Many Stories a Week Do You Have to Write as Journalist?

In an article last year, the Columbia Journalism Review published snippets of an email sent from the editor-in-chief of Newsweek to staff.

In her email, Nancy Cooper urged the journalists working for her to do better. “We don’t want fewer stories or slower stories, just to make every story we do better,” she wrote.

“But Cooper allowed her staff no time to meet these goals,” the CJR article says. “A few months earlier she’d told reporters they’d have to write a minimum of four stories per day, and now they felt she was asking for more while giving less.”

We’re curious whether journalists in Ireland are facing similar pressure to produce more and more, in the same amount of time, with the same resources.

How many articles do you have to file each week? How do you think that impacts on accuracy? On your ability to report?

Do you think your publication would suffer if it eased up on you a bit, and just published fewer articles – but gave you more time to do report, write, and fact-check them?

If you’re a journalist in Ireland, I’d be really grateful if you would fill out my quick survey, to help me get a good view of the landscape, and to help readers get a peek into the newsrooms of Ireland today.

I’ll be sharing what the results in a media column looking at the workload of journalists in Ireland today, and what research says about the relationship between the health of a media organisation, and the number of stories it publishes.

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