3 ms·
A single piece of investigative journalism can cost the NYT 500,000 easily. A reporter can work for a year on a single article where every piece of evidence has
by gizmo 3y ago
A single piece of investigative journalism can cost the NYT 500,000 easily. A reporter can work for a year on a single article where every piece of evidence has to to be verified, lawyers are involved to check liability, the journalist(s) and photographers have to travel around the world to follow leads. Then the article needs to be written and illustrated, and coded if it has animated graphics. It's all super expensive but the NYT can afford this because they have a multi-billion dollar annual budget. When you're on substack you have to churn out content or your subs will cancel. The only way to consistently create content is to write editorials.
See for example "These Journalists Spent Two Years and $750,000 Covering One Story": https://archive.ph/L7PA2 https://archive.ph/L7PA2
- mike_hearn 3y agoAll that shows is that the NYT does some very expensive things. It doesn't prove that all investigative journalism costs that much. Many useful investigations are essentially a series of FOIAs and working through source documents, don't require a year of work and don't require animated hand-coded graphics. Newspapers also have to churn out content or else their subs will cancel. That's inherent to any form of recurring subscription journalism.