I’d tended to think of the acceleration of journalism as being a matter of fewer staff producing more copy. But this passage from Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth suggests the changing demands of editing are a factor as well. From pg 416:
Before she left for ProPublica, Marilyn Thompson, the investigative reporter and proponent of “slow journalism,” found herself editing a slew of stories each day on the national desk. There was so much to edit that she often used one of her days off to work on the longer pieces that probed Washington’s underbelly of money and lobbying. With fewer editors and staffers engaged in story production (“the process people”), the responsibility for everything fell on the shoulders of editors who before the social media era had had time to brainstorm with reporters or change a story’s architecture and flow. Now they were expected to do and check everything, from writing the myriad headlines for different platforms to inserting hyperlinks referring to other stories—all at a sprinter’s pace.
Mark Carrigan 