WSJ Journalists Give 130 Percent for the Team!

Richard Edelman, the PR guy who blogs about PR on his company’s website, wrote recently that he’d visited the Wall Street Journal offices and met with Gordon Crovitz, the publisher who just stepped down with the arrival of Rupert Murdoch’s People.

Edelman also talked with newsroom staff:

“I learned from my discussions with beat reporters at the Journal that 70% of the time is spent on reporting, about 30% on writing, 10% on recording video and 20% on blogging.”

Newsroom union leaders: Aux barricades! The WSJ rank and file is being forced to do 30 percent more work than humanly possible, thanks to the digital revolution!

Edelman explains that the numbers don’t add up to 100 because “there is some overlap, between content creation and dissemination.” I have no idea what that means.

From where I sit, blogging is writing, capturing video is reporting and for that matter parsing government data into an Excel sheet that the Flash team turns into a graphic that the producer writes captions for to explain to web users is journalism.

The digital revolution has provided new tools and new names, and news ways to think, communicate and improve the world. But it hasn’t provided a 31-hour day.

Unless Rupert has more changes in mind for the Journal than he’s let on.

Explore posts in the same categories: print-to-digital, Wall Street Journal

Tags: Rupert Murdoch

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