[...] a big fan of Mutter’s blog and have previously turned to him for expertise on newspaper-industry finances. The options he and Brill presented in [...]

[...] a big fan of Mutter’s blog and have previously turned to him for expertise on newspaper-industry finances. The options he and Brill presented in [...]

[...] harmful to newspapers in the long term. Here are two reasons why: 1. Investment incentives? — If Zachary Seward’s estimates are correct, it will require at least $114 billion to guarantee the short-term survival of every struggling [...]

[...] thanks to Zachary Seward over on the  Nieman Journalism Lab blog, we now have a number: $114 [...]

When the news product finds it’s fans.

We know they might be fans when they click on a story. We can guess that they are probably fans, if they come back a couple of times to a story about on the same subject. We are sure they are fans when they exchange money for something the paper has produced.

That something might be access to a service in which the beat reporter is obligated to respond to reasonable comments and questions by a subscription only group of fans.

That something might be a paperback book, printed using on demand and digital techniques analyzing the history and developments within a particular beat over say six months.

Other somethings are best left to the inventiveness of editors, journalists and salespeople who are on ground.

Two things to keep in mind.
1. Readers, as opposed to scanners or viewers, are a niche market. The good news is that they are growing.

2. The big stories of the next few years is NOT the silly but wonderfully entertaining political “he said, she said, he stole, they think.” The big stories are going to be about health, education and regional economic development. Those are the natural beats. IMHO.

There are many tools falling into place to gather the information to help people understand those stories. i really do believe that 3 is the magic number. Too many more, the communication overhead is not worth it. Less than three, it falls into a personal as opposed to a professional relationship.

But as long as newspapers think they are in the aggregate eyeball business, as opposed to helping citizens learn to think about the complex choices we are all going to have make business, it doesn’t matter how much staff, what you do with them, whether you Print or don’t Print.

Better off getting rid of everyone except the five or so people you need to run a very profitable shopper that is all ads.

[...] of journalism isn’t about propping up or replacing the system that we’re currently losing but building new ones.” Much of journalism is still profitable, and the rest needs more than a bailout. … So if I [...]

More reporters, like more teachers doesn’t necessarily lead to better organizational outcomes. The issue is how those resources are used.

In a google-mart economy labor can be redeployed to create a lot more with a lot less. The real problem is where those resources are focused. If the whole outfit is focused on advertising – aggregating eyeballs or clicks – to sell, there is no positive feedback loop that leads to incremental improvements in the product.

@David,
‘Eliminating, or deeply cutting, print would allow that to fall more.’ Actually not so much. Print is a well defined process that creates a product with little management time necessary. You don’t have to pull together a web team to figure out the best way to deliver the medium. The recent improvements in Print are only making it cheaper, better, and more flexible every day.

Also, framing the discussion as Print v Web, eliminates from consideration the proven method of making money. In the local space, most business – especially SMB, values print and sees the web as servingg a niche market. Not the mass market of conumser they need to find.

A more reasonable approach is to frame it as web + Print as different parts of one communication ecology, whose interaction creates a stable revenue stream from different sources.

IMHO, the web should be used to locate and aggregate fans. Print + web should deliver what those fans are willing to pay for.

Another point of comparison is the news staffs at the most robust community news sites. (MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, etc.) They’re probably more like 3-5 percent the size of the newsrooms at their respective metropolitan dailies. Their work looks more like the basis of what a future newspaper staff could be: city hall, education, politics, development (no sports). Of course, these sites are overwhelmingly the product of philanthropy at the moment.

On the L3C front, Vermont’s relatively new law has been kicking up more interest in this arena because, as I understand it, directors of a for-profit would be able to consider their social mission ahead of profits.

Online, the economic balance varies tremendously from site to site, since content may come from many sources including unpaid bloggers and readers themselves. I don’t think you can define a set ratio based on population of a metro area, although for any site there’s going to be a point of diminishing returns where adding more content won’t increase page views or potential revenue. I do think that with a bit more experience, we’ll be able to talk in terms of the content infrastructure necessary to support an online community of a certain size.

A more productive way to think about it is how many to cover a beat. Base the beat first on what is most interesting to mass ciriculation. Education, health and city hall are pretty good places to start.

As a beat gets traction, measured by hits at the website, scale in print.

Later, organize beats on geographical or ethnic or whatever tribal catogories are appropriate.

There is a serious argument, most forcefully argued in Riech’s book on SuperCapitalism that the idea of corporate social responsibility and corporations being good citizens is fatally flawed. After readying the book, I think he’s got it just right.

— How many journalists do you need to employ to cover a typical metro area? Alan Mutter told me that in the print world, the answer was long considered to be 1 reporter per 1,000 circulation, but many newspapers now settle for .9, .8, and even less. Is there a similar calculation we can make for an online-only news organization? And how is it affected by the ability to include “the people formerly known as the audience” in the news-gathering process?

— Is it reasonable anymore for one news organization to cover an entire metro area? Should we only be talking about outfits that focus on specific topic or segments of a local area?

— The L3C. My boss Josh mentioned this to me on Thursday, and it was the first I’d heard of it. Lots of newspapers have been tripped up by their dual goals of doing good and making money (Geneva Overholser has written about this), and the L3C sounds like something of a middle ground. Thanks for the tip, Bernie (and thanks for leading the Guild).

To your other points. Exactly. It’s not about profit vs non profit. It’s about sustainability.