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.

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.

The issue should be divided on whether the organization is self-sustainable by creating a value that someone is willing to pay for. Many institutions do need seed money to support them through an incubation period. But if it’s long term, you’ve only traded the advertiser for the funder.

Foundation support is subject to moral hazard and the dog food business problem. The dog food business is one in which the person who either buys or funds does not use the product. It’s not insurmountable but it makes life much more complicated since the incentives are misaligned.

It’s a similar problem in education, health and government. Imagine if elected officials and political appointees were disqualified from government health care and pensions. My bet is that we would be much further along.

It’s a similar problem in the financial industry. The latest stories on the bonuses on Wall Street. Unfortunately it is also a problem in academia. While tenure is important for many things, it is important to appreciate that the unintended consequences can undermine the mission of creating a cohort that is skilled at learning.

These are complex issues. Different solutions in different contexts. But just more money can actually make it worse, rather than better.

I only have experience with NPR in NYC – WNYC.org. Some years ago it was purchased from the NYC government. What I know is only from the outside, but..it seems that a significant portion of their revenue stream comes listeners who give because the service has value. They do not have to give. But clearly they do.

It’s not profit, but they do have a definable metric from the user of their service whether the service is good. The issue is not one of morality. The issue is getting a clear signal of what is working – for the listener – not the advertiser or the funder. With good management that signal informs a natural evolution to incremental improvement.

How many people would willingly contribute to get the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times? I don’t know the answer, but I bet it would tell us alot about the product they produce for their readers, not to collect eyeballs to sell their advertisers.

OK, it’s a given that journalists have something of a Messiah Complex. You have to have something else going on psychologically to get into this low-pay high-stress field. But this is really crossing the line. And making an unfortunate conflatio…

3 per beat. An outside person, an inside person and a great writer (rewrite).

The outside person walks the street, has meetings, interacts in the real world. She writes her notes on a blackberry, which goes onto a wiki.

The inside person is online as close to 24/7 as possible. Can be offsite. Could be done by an excessed journalist, or perhaps two part timers working from home to keep a 24/7 watch.

The rewrite person could also be anywhere. Works in the cloud.

The inside person twitters, blogs, stays immersed in the conversations in the cloud. The info is organized in a wiki. The inside person keeps the wiki neat and straight.

Then when an event occurs, all the background information is at hand. Any member of the 3 person team can spark the story.

The rewrite person – an expert writer – gets a fact sheet from the other two. Then starts writing. Posts the story on the wiki.

When the publishing event is about to happen, central production goes to wiki, gets the story and copies into a layout program or the web.

it’s done.

The paper is grown organically beat by beat. Usually the best beat to start with is education. Every parent in any area is focused on education.

Depending on the region, beats are added as interest and advertising are developed. First on the web, if it garners enough hits to earn it’s place in the paper, the beat gets into Print.

You build the audience and the advertising on the web, when it’s mature, only then does it earn a place in the valuable real estate of the Printed page.

But I’ll offer a small, additional twist: The math for newsrooms in question is certainly close enough for hand grenades. But that analysis doesn’t begin to answer a more-basic question: How many people do you really need to cover City X?

Yeah, I know John Carroll famously said of the L.A. Times newsroom: “I have 1,300 people, and it’s never enough.”

Yet we all can name legendary characters who took up space and money with zero (or worse) impact on the end product. One senior staffer I could name was derisively referred to “deputy managing editor for lunch.” Her partner was the “deputy managing editor for rearranging furniture.” A third had an uncanny ability to disappear when major news broke. If this discussion were over a beer, any of you could top me three times over.

But, you say, all of those people have already been forced out. Perhaps. (Really?)

A better set of questions, I humbly submit: Assume we are starting an organization designed to ferret out the news in our City X. We acknowledge from the start that world and national is commoditized, and will come from other sources. We’re purely local (including local sports, local business and local features). But we’re funding this from our own pockets – so we’re rigorously focus on must-have local coverage, not nice-to-haves (like, say, a “local” movie critic).

With those assumptions, how many people would we need?

How would we organize our production process to keep as many of those people on the street with a notebook in their pocket and a flinty look in their eyes?

How would we organize to ensure as little time as possible was spent jawboning in meetings, or doing rework (like “editing” a piece that has already gone through three sets of eyeballs)?

The challenge for all of us is to boldly assert those kinds of plans, not simply concoct ways to shave a little more from the existing model.

(A friend in another shop has already done that for his market – without his bosses’ knowledge, and purely on the back of an envelope. He threw out a number that was roughly one-third the size of the existing newsroom in his market.

(Y’know what? With the right people, I’d go to war in that market with that number tomorrow.)

Also see Alan Mutter’s wise points this morning here: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-well-endowed-should-you-be.html

Oh, that makes good business sense. Endow failed products that demonstrably aren’t serving their customers well.

These proposals to prop-up failed services are really attempts by journalists (I’m fifth-generation) to continue what they’ve long been doing rather than face the fact that their practices and the services they produce no longer satisfy the people they say they serve.

Don’t get me wrong. By change practices, I don’t mean journalists should no longer be accurate, objective, probitive, etc. I don’t mean they should pander to the lowest common demoninator (hello, Britney!) I mean it’s blatantly obvious that the packages of content they choose to produce (in newspapers, news magazines, and broadcast programs) is increasingly not what satisfies people’s needs or interests. Those products and services must be radically revamped, rather than sustained.

Let evolution take its course and let these failed products die. New species will arise to replace them. This unfortunately might mean a brief ‘Gray Age’ when some stories don’t see the light of day, but the more brief this transition, the better for society.