May 4, 2009 10:28 AM
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Tue Feb 9
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Politico WINS THE HOUR with a profile of Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, and finds staffers chafing under a "grueling pace, constant pressures for content, and strict enforcement from the site's managing editor." Sounds familiar!
Politico's Michael Calderone surveys the challenges facing TPM in the post-Bush era, and settles on high staff turnover as the angle most likely to make his piece the "most e-mailed" story that his mother would read and that other bloggers would write about (score!). Congressional correspondent Elana Schor and bloggers Paul Kiel and Greg Sargent have left the site in recent months, and high-profile hire Matt Cooper is scaling back to an editor-at-large role. Calderone cites burnout from the site's demanding pace:
"Your deadline for everything is yesterday, basically," Kiel said. "And you have to maintain that pace throughout the whole day, the whole week, and occasionally weekends."
Wow, that does sound tough. But at least Marshall and his draconian managing editor David Kurtz aren't writing overcapitalized memos about how "SPEED KILLS" and "WE WILL NOT SURVIVE AND WE WON'T HAVE JOBS" unless you spice up that TPM piece with some kind of interesting angle, Calderone.
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