Simon Owens interviewed John Schlander, the managing editor of personal finance site The Penny Hoarder, about its operations.
Here is an excerpt:
If you look at it on a weekly basis in terms of how you produce content. What’s the way of pitching and vetting the process for potential articles that you’re going through? Do you rely on a network of freelancers? Is it mostly in house? What’s the editorial structure that allows you guys to decide what content to pursue?
We’re mostly in house. We’re set up remarkably like a traditional newsroom, but perhaps without some of the baggage. We’re not a general interest site, we’re very specific on our mission here. All about personal finance. And then we’re set up on teams that are covering certain topic areas. We’ve developed beats here as well. We’re in that sense a pretty traditional setup of editors and writers and photographers, graphic artists, video staff. We pull all that together each day into a daily report, just like a daily newspaper might do. We’re also working on longer term stuff as well.
What are some of the beats that people cover? You have actual beat writers on different subject matters?
Yeah, they tend to pick up a couple different topic areas. Our broad areas, we have one team that’s over deals and what we call smart money, which is what we call traditional personal finance. And food, that’s sort of one team that’s doing that. One particular writer, for instance, writes a lot about groceries. And retail. Another writer on our lifestyles team writes about parenting and transportation. So we’ve picked out some of these areas that have really resonated with our readers, where we can really offer actionable tips, personal stories, job opportunities. That’s another beat we have. We call it our make money team. They do a lot of work with our work from home jobs portal, as well as writing about career tips.
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