How Ed Silverman’s Pharmalot blog has built reader loyalty

Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Pharmalot blogger Ed Silverman, whose blog covering the pharmaceutical industry now resides at the Boston Globe’s State.

Here is an excerpt:

Ellis: How has your reporting changed as a result of writing Pharmalot for so long?

Silverman: When I first started it in early 2007, the pieces were shorter and I aggregated as much as I wrote something of my own. By aggregate, I mean I’d see something interesting on Reuters or The New York Times and I’d condense it to four grafs and hit the publish button.I would put up eight, nine, items a day.

But after a while of doing that, I realized there was no longer much value in trying to outgun websites, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Journal, and say I could do it faster, if not better. To say: “I can do it just as well” and see if I can get it out there 20 minutes before them. At the end of the day, it doesn’t quite matter that much, because the stuff circulates and you have to have something different to bring to the party beyond the same headline everyone has. But just to do it for the sake of it meant less.

That evolved, over the years, to the point where I don’t do six to eight items a day. Most days, I just do two or three. Because there’s so much on the Internet: Reuters, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, they have teams of people. If the Journal team is busy, they still have a spot news desk. So the news gets out there, it gets picked up on Yahoo Finance, even if it’s only a four-paragraph item. But that’s maybe the same four paragraphs I could have done. So do I spend all that energy?

Read more here.