How One Journalist Used Multiple Pseudonyms to Fill an Entire Page — and Take Home All the Fees

The Pseudonym Strategy I Discovered During My First Internship

Some people say doing both — or doing everything at once — is a bad idea. Whenever I hear that, I think back to my very first internship at a regional newspaper in Kemerovo.

Every day, that paper ran a full page of local news. On average, around fifteen different short pieces would fit on that page. And of course, every piece was signed by a different journalist. Or so I thought.

How One Freelancer Used Pseudonyms to Own an Entire Page

That assumption fell apart the moment I actually met one of the journalists from that paper. It turned out he was writing every single one of those pieces — alone. He just had a stack of pseudonyms and rotated through them. And he collected the full fee for the entire page.

He was good at it, too. I still remember asking him how he pulled it off. I don’t recall his exact words, but the gist was something like: stop overthinking it, claim your page and get to work.

Why the Pseudonym Strategy Changed the Way I Think About Productivity

That conversation opened up a whole new world for me. I realized that the ceiling on how much you can produce isn’t set by convention — it’s set by how willing you are to work. A pseudonym isn’t a trick. It’s a tool. And the journalist who used fifteen of them wasn’t cutting corners; he was filling a page that needed to be filled, better than anyone else around him.

The lesson stayed with me: you can always do more than the format suggests.