Friday, July 10, 2009
News / Media / Chicagoland How much is that story in the browser window?
Posted by Whet Moser on 07.10.09 at 02:00 PM
Clever ideas in funding journalism: the Chi-Town Daily News is calculating per-article cost and putting it at the end with a donation request. A story about a controversial condo project in Uptown that may not get built even after the developer demolished a century-old Victorian house: $691.
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I saw that too, and was wondering how it got calculated. Presumedly some sort of cost-per hour, with incidental expenses?
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We actually calculated our costs for a year and divided by the number of words we published to get a cost per word. It's 67 cents. Multiply that times the number of words in the article, and ... voila! It's not meant to be a down-to-the-penny cost -- just a rough indication that lets people know about what goes into the article they're reading. We spent a lot of time going through records on the Uptown article, tracking down an uncooperative alderunit, and actually ended up talking with our counsel about one aspect of the article. So in reality, it probably cost a lot more than $691. But others cost less.
