Podcast: Silverman on lessons learned from Pharmalot

Ed Silverman, one of the original and best beat bloggers, is leaving The Star-Ledger and Pharmalot.

Silverman discussed both lessons he learned from Pharmalot and the reasons why he decided to move on in this week’s podcast. You can find more information about Silverman’s decision here as well. He spent two years working on Pharmalot, but it really took him a year to really become the efficient, prolific beat blogger he was.

“It took me a year to really get a groove going in terms of how to manage my time and to develop the best routine so I could be efficient and effective,” he said. “It’s the sort of work you have to immerse yourself in and learn the hard way.”

One of Silverman’s biggest lessons for would-be beat bloggers is his work ethic. Silverman doggedly worked his beat, often putting in long hours many days in a row. He completely immersed himself within the world of pharma, becoming one of the leading sources of information on the industry.

“To make the kind of site that I had going, I really had to read everything I could,” he said. “It takes a lot of time to really become so intimately familiar with a subject so that you know when something pops up you can say, ‘yeah that’s old.’”

Silverman believes it takes long hours to make a successful blog because there are so many blogs available. He said that if he just worked four hours a day on Pharmalot that the site wouldn’t have gotten nearly the traffic. Pharmalot was able to garner 11,000 unique visitors a day partly because it had so much news and information on it, and the site was updated throughout the day.

“If you’re going to be a go-to-site that’s going to offer more than just selective items and to do what I did and provide a wide variety of items … you have to put in long hours,” he said. “The site has to be constantly refreshed.”

The hours he worked were considerably differently than when he was a newspaper reporter. He said writing for print was more like working bankers hours, compared with the varying and sometimes long hours of blogging. 

Despite the success of Pharmalot (plenty of visitors and page views), there was never any talk of adding additional staff onto Pharmalot. Unfortunately for Pharmalot, as the site was ascending, the Ledger was descending. The financial situation of the paper didn’t afford for an expansion of new media projects like Pharmalot.

“The paper took precendee and they had to do what they were doing to prop up revenue and keep down expenses,” he said. “The timing was both fortuitous and unfortunate. It’s sort of a sad irony.”

Silverman does believe that Pharmalot could be a viable entity on its own, without the backing of a major media organization like the Ledger. Pharma is a global beat that appeals to many people, and Pharmalot was able to capture a sizable audience in two years. 

“The economic environment has to be conducive to that of course,” he said about a site like Pharmalot trying to go it alone. “Timing is everything, right?”

Silverman may be blogging again for his new employer Elsevier, a publisher of science and health information, but his exact role has yet to be decided.

Other topics discussed:

• The reasons why Silverman thought it was time to move on. 
• Silverman’s role as an aggregator and how it made him more of an editor than a writer.
• Key tips for would-be beat bloggers.
• What is the fate of Pharmalot? Will the site be retired?
• Can you separate Pharmalot from Silverman? Would a Pharmalot without Silverman really be the same blog? 

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.