There are 43187 Text, Markdown or word processor documents on my laptop’s hard drive. iCloud has another 10k or so documents that are not also stored on the laptop. Google Drive and OneDrive have around 8k and 4k respectively.

That makes a total of around 65k documents.

There are duplicates. Realistically there would be 45k unique documents or thereabouts.

Typewriter era

This is not a complete picture of my output over the years. I’ve been a journalist for 44 years. Much of my earlier output for newspapers and magazines was pre-personal computer, typed on manual typewriters.

When computers first entered newspaper offices, we typed on terminals connected to minicomputers. There are precious few files from that era in my collection.

Later I worked on publisher’s content management systems. Some of that work made it onto the hard drive, most didn’t.

In house and freelance

Roughly a third of my career was spent working in-house either full time or part-time.

There were freelance jobs that happened while I was in full-time employment. This wasn’t in any way unusual back in the early years of my career. I could write a story for The Dominion in Wellington, go home and type out a fresh version to sell to newspapers in the US, UK or Australia. The practice was not even remotely frowned on. Management saw it as being dynamic and enterprising.

Nobody does back-of-an-envelope calculations these days, but if we still did, we can see that my output works out at a shade over 20 items a week. That seems right.

High turnover

When I worked on newspapers it wasn’t unusual to file four or five stories a day.

Freelance journalists have to pump out lots of paid-by-the-word stories to earn a crust. I had a freelance job in Australia where I filled-in for someone who was on leave and I managed six a day for the first few days until the editor looked at his budget and told me to slow down.

This might not be high by modern digital journalism standards. I know of younger journalists who might deliver a story every hour, but a lot of my work was not based on press releases, but on getting out of the office and talking to people. For many of today’s journalists, it is an office job. I was initially drawn to journalism precisely because it was not an office job.

Fewer, longer stories

There would have been more, but shorter stories early in my career. For most of the last 15 years the number of items has fallen, but the individual stories are longer. These days I mainly write features.

There’s a life’s work on the hard drive. It’s archived on a NAS drive, a second external hard drive and a third Time Machine backup is locked in a cupboard. Then there is the iCloud back-up. It sounds excessive, even paranoid, but the collection is one of my most valuable assets.

My next challenge is to find a way to make better use of it. There may be a book in it or not. Either way, what happens next is another story and, most likely, another document.