Blowing Apart the old Reporter-to-Reader Ratio

That old Newsosaur is at it again, digging through the archeological ruins of the newspaper industry to unearth another one of those unwritten rules-of-thumb that are rapidly being rendered irrelevant by our evolving business models.

Today’s gem held that a newspaper should employ one journalist for every 1,000 readers, and recent job cuts at dailies like the Chicago Tribune are just now dropping the headcount below that threshold.

The question is whether this is a bad thing. As late as the 1960s and beyond, many journalists had to rely on a set of mature technologies as well as a workflow that ensured that the production of news would be a time-consuming process.

Everything from old dial telephones plugged into the wall to manual typewriters to proof sheets run by unionized linotype operators kept the production of news to a fairly leisurely pace (compared to today’s expectations), and it also meant that deadlines were in fact deadlines.

Today the 8th largest news site doesn’t even employ one journalist, and that of course, is Google News. Of course, Google doesn’t do journalism, it aggregates the journalism done by others. But from a business perspective, whether the news is original or not is irrelevant; what matters is where the revenue lands.

It’s incredibly simple to become a publisher today, as every blogger knows. With our overhead so drastically reduced, and with the dimensions of time, space, and place vastly diminished in importance, suddenly it is possible to serve an audience of, say, one million visitors with far fewer than the old rule of 1,000 journalists.

In fact, in the online environment, such ratios would be so unsustainable as to be laughable. Besides, in the old world, readers generated quite a bit of revenue in the form of subscription fees, newsstand sales, display ads and classified advertising — all of which subsidized our work, but much of which has disappeared.

Nowadays, most online news revenue is dependent on banner ads or one of the more innovative contextual advertising models via collaborative filtering and other disruptive technologies. In a relative sense, the old revenue stream supporting us has narrowed to a mere trickle.

The bottom line is that although we can produce much more news and circulate it far faster, further, and cheaper than our predecessors ever could have imagined, we don’t yet have an effective model to get paid  for doing that work. Thus, the present trauma gripping the news business, not to mention the raison d’être for this blog.