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Oct. 17, 2011, 1:30 p.m.

Adam Moss: NY Mag publishes new content every six minutes

…and “the editing process is zero, pretty much.”

Here’s a tidbit that will likely make your organizational productivity seem wildly inadequate: NYmag.com publishes new material every six minutes. Every six minutes.

You’re welcome.

In a talk celebrating the 25th anniversary of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Friday, the celebrated New York mag editor Adam Moss — in conversation with Daniel Okrent — shared that stat.

Moss later clarified: That’s every six minutes during working hours. “It starts at that speed at 8:30 in the morning,” Moss says, “ending about 7.” The rate then lightens considerably from 7 in the evening until the next morning (though “we still publish 8 or 9 things overnight”).

Of course, “everything has a different size,” Moss notes.

Still.

As for traffic: “If it gets 10,000 readers, that’s a successful blog post,” Moss says. (For a mag piece posted online, the goal jumps to 200,000 or 300,000 — or more, depending on the piece.)

It’s a nice reminder of the individual energy and institutional resources required to keep the famously doing-well-online NY Mag…doing well online. Moss mentioned that he sees his job as editor as, primarily, “personnel”: hiring good people who are smart enough to create quality content, fast enough to keep the site’s frenetic pace, and accurate enough not to need editorial oversight for individual content contributions. Because one thing that helps with all this uber-productivity is the fact that “the editing process online is zero, pretty much,” Moss says. “I’m not that comfortable with that, but that’s practical reality. It’s a speed business.”

POSTED     Oct. 17, 2011, 1:30 p.m.
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