How much do journalists write?
 Someone started an amusing thread on Journobiz the other day about fictional journalists and how they never seem to write anything. (My Journobiz colleague Sally Whittle has already blogged about this, but I suppose there’s no rule saying two people shouldn’t blog about the same subject. If only.)

Carrie Bradshaw inhabits a fabulous Manhattan apartment on the earnings apparently derived from one column a week. Sarah-Jane Smith in The Sarah-Jane Adventures carries out the occasional investigation but never files any copy. George Clooney as a foreign correspondent in The Good German isn’t seen writing anything at all. In fact, nobody came up with an example of a fictional journalist who has anything like a realistic workload.

I suspect this leads people to underestimate how much work journalists do, and therefore overestimate how much they get paid. I don’t have any evidence for this (I don’t go round asking my friends “how much work do you think I do?”) but from occasional remarks I think people imagine journalists writing a couple of leisurely features a month. (People assume, for example, that when you complain you have a deadline pressing down on you, it’s because you’ve left the work until the last minute, when in fact it’s because you’ve had deadlines stacked up next to each other for several weeks.)

So, if you’re interested, I reckon the average freelance journalist (by average, I mean “me”) writes about 2,000 to 3,000 words a week. That covers a multitude of sins, of course, such as feature-writing, news-writing and corporate copywriting. Some weeks you write much less, because you’re interviewing for one piece or setting up interviews for the piece after that, but equally there are weeks you write more.

For staff journalists on a weekly or daily publication, it can be much more pressured: you may be expected to knock something out in a couple of hours, often on a subject you know nothing about. (A staff writer on The Independent told me she was expected to write 1000 words a day.) When readers complain that a journalist hasn’t done their research properly, the reason is usually because the journalist has had to produce a 1000 words in the short space available between writing two other 1000-word features on completely different subjects.

You can see why representations of fictional journalists are so unrealistic, though. A tv programme based around someone sitting at their desk all day, eating biscuits, making phone calls and typing furiously as the clock makes its way towards 5pm (in my case, 3pm) just wouldn’t be very gripping.