It&#x27;s hard to say what &quot;heavy&#x2F;investigative reporting&quot; means in the context of Buzzfeed. I don&#x27;t expect we&#x27;re talking multi-month government corruption investigative journalism. But a couple of weeks to a month is still pretty reasonable for a 6000 word story that requires setting up and conducting a bunch of interviews and doing other research.<p>My rule of thumb has generally been about 1000 words a day not counting any heavy research so your numbers seem pretty reasonable.<p>Furthermore, freelancers rarely have a fully booked schedule and they need to spend time on tasks like prospecting for new work.<p>In a prior life, we&#x27;d get paid very nicely on a daily basis for consulting and other custom&#x2F;semi-custom work. But the reality was that we weren&#x27;t actually on the clock very much and spent a lot of time maintaining the knowledge base that let us do those jobs when they came along.