Rembrandt Already Did That

I’ve reached a point in journalism where my publication production is based directly upon how many articles I can possibly publish, which is directly based on how much time I have. More time = more articles = more money.

I’ve been hitting a big bottleneck each month that I just can’t produce as much as I am able to otherwise publish, which has lead me to devising ways to streamline the process:

I keep thinking of how assembly lines increase efficiency by segmenting tasks to multiple individuals or how passing construction materials from person to person along a line allows for faster movement of each piece. What if I could break down the process of writing articles into separate tasks and employ a small team to work on them together.

So I could plan out the basic framework of an article, write up my interview questions, send this off to a researcher who assembles the background information and does the interviews; then these interviews are passed off to a transcriber, who handles the arduous, time consuming task of transferring recorded interviews into text; and when this is done it’s all sent back to me to put it all together, write it up, and publish.

The more I thought about this the more it became apparent how much it could scale my ability to produce and how I could actually write all of the stories I want to publish, the more feasible it seemed.

I could run something in journalism like Rembrandt did with painting.