Wednesday marks one year since National Zero ditched our original model of copying and pasting text from articles on other news websites for our content. Aside from specific items like press releases, official statements, court documents, and other circumstances, the last 365 days of articles have been 100% original (except for that one day in May when my keyboard shit out).

Oh and then there’s the “articles” that are tweets, videos, screenshots, Truth Social posts, et cetera-only. Those obviously aren’t original content. But all that aside, minus the quotes we lift from the articles we source, we can say with pride that the text content of National Zero has been almost entirely originally composed for the past year. Almost no exceptions. Very, very few of them.

Now we’re not going to badmouth PoliticalWire.com at all here given how much we owe Taegan Goddard for pioneering this format. He probably wasn’t first, but we have yet to see anyone better at delivering a rapid fire, quick update experience better than he has. And he’s freaking fast too. Rarely do the shitheels at The Hill get to aggregating a big story before he does.

That being said, it’s really not that hard to do it the way we do it now. Some stories just basically write themselves. Our story on the House Ways and Means Dems obtaining Trump’s tax returns took less than a minute to compose. Didn’t even need to read the CNN article we both sourced from to explain it to our audience. We got the word out in our own words and have the flexibility to expand on it with our own analysis/opinion if we so choose. We very often do.

Which takes more time, with or without a wacky/sarcastic/etc spin, which takes even longer to get right. There were days in 2020 when we would crank out 40 or 50 articles from early morning to late at night as if we were a fully staffed operation. Nowadays 20 articles is a busy day at National Zero. There are often gaps in coverage, both in terms of hours between articles (especially on weekends) and in certain storylines. We have to skip some things that we wouldn’t have if we could rely on content written by other people. Certain stories that could use more in-depth coverage and good analysis sometimes get breezed over so we can report on other shit.

It’s still worth it. It’s a better, more distinct product that we put out and more gratifying personally than just copying and pasting a few paragraphs from the New York Times and telling everyone we “scooped” The Hill because of that. This is much more ethical-ish journalism too.

*Note: Credit to my partner Jack, who actually did mostly write original stories before the switch one year ago. Thanks for (not directly, but by example) kicking my ass into making that needed change.