The pressure to produce copy at Business Insider

Huffington Post business reporter Shane Ferro writes on Medium about the pressure she experienced while working at Business Insider to produce copy.

Ferro writes, “I never came close to hitting my goals, despite the fact that I became something of a hot take machine, churning out opinions day after day. Some of them took off and got what was seen as an adequate amount of traffic. Some didn’t. A lot of them I’m actually quite proud of, probably only because I took some time to think through them. That was good for individual pieces, but bad for my job.

“As Tanzina says in her tweetstorm, it takes quite a bit of thought to come up with a coherent opinion. I don’t have five opinions per day. I have maybe one. So I’d try to hit my post goal with other kinds of stories. An economic data point here and there. A reblog of an interesting article from someone else. Nothing quite got enough traffic.

“The pro-labor rights econ nerd in me has at times been really angry with BI for how much content they try to squeeze out of writers. But the truth is I knew what I was getting into when I joined. I left a pretty cushy job at Reuters for Business Insider because both there and at a previous job I’d gotten the critique that I didn’t produce copy fast enough. At Reuters, looking back, that criticism was nine months into my career as a financial journalist. I wasn’t fast enough because I was still learning my beat, and I was taking the time to make sure what I was writing was correct. But I took it to heart, and I got a job at BI because I knew that people were required to churn out a ton of copy every day. I wanted to learn how to be Joe Weisenthal.”

Read more here.