The Independent posted a story about Defra Minister David Miliband’s blog and how, despite the fact that he apparently posts all the entries himself, it costs the British taxpayer £40,000 a year to maintain it. Why? Because it currently takes up 40% of the working day of two grade-seven civil servants to put it together.
Unfortunately it costs £1 to buy the story on the Independent site, but the Guardian has blogged about it here.
I’m sure whoever came up with the idea of this blog had good intentions, hoping to make the Department for Food and Rural Affairs more cuddly and approachable, but how can they justify an annual spend of £40,000? It works out – so they say – at £1 a word. (Which makes the £1 read-it fee the Independent is charging seem suddenly quite reasonable).
That’s an extraordinary sum when freelance rates for magazine writing, in the technology press at least, are hovering around £200 per 1,000 words, or 20p a word. 50p a word would be a great rate, but I know of at least one magazine that has recently cut its rates to £80 a page. With most pages requiring around 800 words to fill, that’s just 10p a word. Admittedly it’s inexcusably stingy, but it’s just one tenth the cost of that governmental blog.
Surely (surely) it would be better to rethink the whole organisation of the thing, can the in-house staff and hire the poor freelancers who have just had their rates cut to 10p a word to write it for, say 35p a word. Suddenly the site would cost just £14,000 a year to run. Still not peanuts, but a far more palatable sum for something funded out of the public purse.
On another note, if it takes 40% of the time of two grade-seven civil servants to put this together, and that equates to £40,000, it clearly costs £20,000 per civil servant. Do the maths and they must each be on a £50,000 salary. Are they the world’s highest-paid bloggers?
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