Guilty as charged. We sometimes need a helping hand from a copy editor here and there, because we are not native English speakers, but want to write in English just because its the global lingua franca. Now there’s Wordy, a Danish startup, to help out. We saw Wordy already present in Copenhagen back in June at the ArcticEvening event we held there. Back then they were still in closed beta and only now have opened up.
Here’s a presentation (video below; start at 00:23:20) from Wordy, when they were at LeWeb last week.
I would almost consider using the service if 1) we would not have already partnered with our own and 2) the pace at which you many times publish a blog like ours does not allow the luxury of long cycle times for copy editors (even though Wordy lets you set the delivery time you like, say for 15 minutes or less). I see the value for lets say a research oriented media or someone looking for riding the ‘fast food content’ wave, pushing out how-to articles and optimizing for Google, but for anyone who’s even remotely thinking of publishing breaking news, Wordy, or any other copy editing service, is just too slow.
Wordy has currently 71 copy editors working at the service. They take €12 for 400 words of which the editor keeps 85%, while Wordy gets a 15% commission. Something that’s very interesting and might bring a lot more business for Wordy is the fact that they are building plug-ins for all the major publishing platforms, including the one we use, namely WordPress. Just as the judges at LeWeb, I don’t know the market size for such a service, but I know that if Wordy would tweak their offering towards being part of this, the market would shot right up and all of a sudden they’d be part of the future of journalism. Sad, but true. This is where we’re heading.
