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Arlington, Virginia. In most newsrooms, the joke would have been obvious.

It was April Fools’ Day last year, and Politico’s top two editors sent an e-mail message to their staff advising of a new 5 a.m. start time for all reporters.

“These pre-sunrise hours are often the best time to reach top officials or their aides,” the editors wrote, adding that reporters should try to carve out personal time “if you need it,” in the mid-afternoon when Internet traffic slows down.

But rather than laugh, more than a few reporters stared at the e-mail message in a panicked state of disbelief.

“There were several people who didn’t think it was a joke. One girl actually cried,” said Anne Schroeder Mullins, who wrote for Politico until last month, when she left to start her own public relations firm.

“I definitely had people coming up to me asking me if it was true.”

Such is the state of the media business these days: frantic and fatigued.

Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way.

Tracking how many people view stories, and then rewarding — or shaming — writers based on those results has become increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms.

The Christian Science Monitor now sends a daily e-mail message to its staff that lists the number of page views for each story on the paper’s Web site that day.

The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all display a “Most Viewed” metric on their home pages.

Some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their stories.

Once only wire-service journalists had their output measured this way.

And in a media environment crowded with virtual content farms where no detail is too small to report as long as it was reported there first, Politico stands out for its frenetic pace or, in the euphemism preferred by its editors, “high metabolism.”

The top editors, who rise as early as 4:30 a.m., expect such volume and speed from their reporters because they believe Politico’s very existence depends, in large part, on how quickly it can tell readers something, anything they did not know.

“At a paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you’re actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file,” said Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor, in an interview from the publication’s offices just across the Potomac River from downtown Washington.

“Now at any point in the day starting at 5 in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity and pressure to get something out.”

At Gawker Media’s offices in Manhattan, a flat-screen television displays the top 10 most-viewed articles across all Gawker Web sites.

The author’s last name, along with the number of page views that hour and overall are prominently shown in real time on the screen, which Gawker has named the “big board.”

“Sometimes one sees writers just standing before it, like early hominids in front of a monolith,” said Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s founder.

Denton said not all writers have warmed to the concept. “But the best exclusives do get rewarded,” he added, noting that bonuses for writers are calculated in part based on page views.

The pace has led to enormous turnovers in staff at digital news organizations.

Departures at Politico lately have been particularly high, with roughly a dozen reporters leaving in the last six months — a high number for a newsroom that has only about 70 reporters and editors.

Gawker has churned through about an editor a year since it began publishing in 2003.

Physically exhausting assembly-line jobs these are not. But the workloads for many young journalists are heavy enough that the strain is starting to show.

“Sometimes you felt like it was just too much, whether it’s the workload, the pressure,” said Helena Andrews, a former Politico reporter who left to write a memoir, “Bitch Is the New Black,” in which she discusses being a young journalist.

“I think that some people felt like they were sinking. It was like boot camp, the Politico. But I know a lot of people were proud they survived.”

Many of Politico’s reporters are in their 20s, enticed by jobs where starting pay can be around $40,000 for the promise of working at a news organization that influences the conversation among Washington’s elite.

VandeHei says editors are self-aware enough to know that reporters can feel pressured at times. But they said the notion of Politico as a journalistic sweatshop is pure mythology.

Still, Politico management seems to be trying to soften some of its rough edges. Employees recently received an e-mail message asking them to wear name tags in the spirit of fostering friendly workplace conversation.


The New York Times