Updated on May 26 at 5:55 p.m. ET
A report from mascot boot camp. Michael Phelps’s diet. Why trees droop at night. Clinton-Trump poll results.
Those are just some of the stories The Washington Post published this week. Every day, the national paper produces an astonishing number of words about an astonishing number of topics. If the scholar Benedict Anderson is right that newspapers help us understand the “simultaneity” of the rest of the country and world, then the Post especially would seem to transmit a great deal of simultaneousness with its stories.
But just how many stories? I recently came across a surprising statistic: The Post publishes an average of 1,200 stories, graphics, and videos per day. That’s more than one story every two minutes. Could it possibly be true?
A Post spokeswoman confirmed the number to me. But there’s a twist—the number includes both staff-produced articles and wire stories, written elsewhere. The Post editorial staff itself produces about 500 stories per day, she said.
That may not sound as large a number—but it still stacks up when compared to its peers.
Let’s start with The New York Times. “NYTimes.com publishes roughly 150 articles a day (Monday-Saturday), 250 articles on Sunday and 65 blog posts per day,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the Times, in an email. “It publishes 330 basic graphics a month, and about 120 items a month published in the interactive template, which includes multimedia, interactive graphics and larger static graphics.” That comes to about 15 pieces of multimedia content per day.