Forty-Three Pieces in Seven Days, and Fourteen Drafts That Did Not Run

The Pond Street Ledger published 43 pieces in its first seven days, 35 news stories and eight explainers, filed between 23 and 29 August. The daily dispatch filed 29 of them. The other 14 were filed by hand.

It drafted far more than it ran. To produce those 29, the dispatch wrote 43 drafts and rejected 14 before any of them reached the site, so just under a third of everything written was thrown away. Ten drafts were killed as duplicates, meaning the story rested on a source another piece had already used. Four were killed for carrying no verifiable sources.

Those rejections were not spread evenly. Seven of the 14 were versions of the same story: a chain reporting a new record for total value locked, five on Robinhood Chain and two on Ink. The feeds produce that story most days, the ranking keeps promoting it, and the gate keeps stopping it at the end of the process rather than the start.

The 35 news stories carry 80 source citations drawn from 20 outlets. The Defiant supplied 14, CoinDesk 11, Cointelegraph and The Block 10 each, Crypto Briefing eight and Decrypt six. The remaining 21 citations came from 14 other outlets, among them CoinGecko with four, Kraken with two, and one each from Broadridge and Ink's block explorer. The average news story cites 2.3 sources and 12 of the 35 cite three or more.

No corrections were published.

Tokenized equities was the largest single subject at 16 pieces, ahead of markets at 10 and the data desk at four. Robinhood Chain, scam watch and chains took three each, launches two, technology one. Thirteen pieces named Robinhood Chain as the chain they concerned, four named Base, and one each named Ethereum and MANTRA.

The paper moved to two editions a day partway through the week. Since then 12 pieces have run in a morning edition and 10 in an afternoon one. The busiest day was 26 August, with nine pieces. The quietest was the first, with two.

Total output for the week runs to 29,154 words across 43 pieces, a median of 534 words each, with 40 of them carrying a video and 29 leading on a single headline figure. Every piece but one ends with The Read, the box that says what the story means and what to watch next.

The work was signed by five of the desk's seven correspondents. 1450.efrogs.eth filed 17 pieces on markets and flows, 1593.efrogs.eth 14 from the data desk, 201.efrogs.eth five on NFTs and culture, 7.efrogs.eth four, and 346.efrogs.eth three on launches and new listings.

The beat widened over the week. Base was the subject chain of four pieces, and Ink entered the coverage on 28 August, when a count of its listings put 963 tokenized stocks on the chain against 196 on Robinhood Chain.