Why we decided to compile a list of Australia’s most published journalists
Compiling a list of Australia’s most prolific journalists isn’t exactly an easy task. Here, Streem’s Conal Hanna explains why it’s an important one.
Eighteen years as a journalist and editor has taken me to some pretty disparate places, from rodeos to religious festivals and the corridors of Parliament House.
One other place I have found myself, several times over the past decade, is in a room with consultants, hired to crack some version of The Digital Media Problem.
Consultants, I have learnt, love modelling, and one of the first things they always ask is how many stories a day a reporter should be able to write.
Word count as the basis for “ranking” a journalist’s worth first began to sneak into the debate about 20 years ago. Even then, it was a sinister concept. Now it’s even more so. In an industry obsessed with words like “matrix” and acronyms like KPI, journalists need to struggle to maintain the dignity and quality of their works and words and to resist being swept along in the sweeping tide of modern churnalism that sometimes favours clickbait over stories of genuine quality and public interest.
I’m not saying it’s bad to have a lot of bylines, or that being prolific is equated with lower quality journalism. Absolutely not. But I am saying that these sorts of measures are unsound and spurious when the real value of good journalism can only be measured in ways that have nothing to do with management-speak.
Someone is confusing data with research.
It’s easy to produce three or four stories a day when you just cut and paste press releases and company announcements or rip off other content like many do these days.
This is a joke, surely.
You took Sarah Thompson of Street Talk off your list because her originally-sourced items didn’t constitute ‘articles’. Yet you left the Daily Mail reporters on the list because presumably their ripping and rewriting of others original work does constitute an article? Come on.
Further, you can’t just dance around the Daily Mail’s editorial standards and your generous characterisation of their ‘rewriting’ of others stories on the basis that everybody else does it. That’s an insult to the many journo’s who invest increasingly scarce time and resources into well-reported original news stories. (Only to see much of it quickly cut and pasted you know where.)
A sad attempt at brand building that doesn’t reflect well on said brand.