The Cost of a Story

February 19 2009, 11:42am

Everyone, including myself, is running on all cylinders these days, trying to frequently post the best possible content for our sites. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have another able body to work with and take some of the pressure off, allowing time to make sure each original piece is the best it could possibly be? Most of the time, to get more stories, you need more people, more journalists. Major media publishers know how much a reporter costs. Perhaps the editors are not as aware, but the accounting team certainly knows how much it costs to support a single writer. I read this great post on ZDNet called “Let’s talk about the economics of great journalism” outlining how expensive a reporter can be. The fully loaded cost of a great reporter doing great work, then, falls somewhere in the $180,000 range:

  $130,000 salary and benefits
  $4,800 a year in subscriptions and other information sources
  $30,000 a year in travel
  $15,000 a year in legal and insurance coverage
  $179,800 total, and that’s before the cost of IT, telecom and office space

$180K. I know that’s more than I make. Granted, this is likely a celebrity journalist with a recognizable name and multiple awards. Most local journalists might rake in around $40-60K (not including benefits). So let’s say that you hire a journalist (and don’t pay them benefits… we’re in a recession, after all). He/she cranks out an average 2 high quality stories a day for you, or 730 stories a year. This means that each story costs you around $50-80. Wouldn’t you like to get paid that much for each blog post (or maybe you do… email me!) So hiring another body to get more stories is probably out of the question (unless you are a millionaire blogger… again, email me!) Syndicated content is now an option, as it is much less expensive than an employee. You might catch some dollar deals, and some articles may cost hundreds or thousands (depending on your topic), but let’s use the NYTimes a la carte price for the sake of argument: $3.95 per story. At only 2 articles per day, you pay over $2800 per year. A bargain compared to adding a reporter, but it seems a little high for 2 articles per day. Then there is OneSpot. Content aggregation overall will get you more articles, but not the same quality you would get from hiring a reporter or selecting syndicated content yourself. OneSpot is content curation, which allows you to have that element of hand selection and editorial voice, but with lots of stories. Your site gets titles and summaries of targeted stories that link to the original story. As Chris Brogan, ChrisBrogan.com, says: “Links tell Google what is important… enough pointers from lots of sites saying similar things [improves SEO].” You become a part of your Web community, not just a site that copies and pastes a story (more on linking in a later post). You can also have interactive discussion pages that encourage audience participation. You can even add your own comments to spark discussion and add your voice. Plus, you save time scouring the Web for stories. Depending on your topic, you may average 50 articles a day. That’s over 18,000 articles a year. At the current price point, that makes each article less than 10 cents. I think that sounds more reasonable. Then again, I’m not a millionaire blogger…