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What's left is local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news. Perhaps 2% of the cost of a typical paper. I'd like to see a cit

What's left is local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news. Perhaps 2% of the cost of a typical paper. I'd like to see a citation on that "2%". I don't believe it. What will we miss? Obviously, the basic reportage function of newspapers is what we'll miss--the boring research, interviewing, verifying, and so on. This is something that bloggers cannot reproduce without a news infrastructure and being on salary.

lliiffee 18y ago
2% seems to me laughably low. I would think it is something like 50%. It might take up 2% of the space of a paper, but the reasons we will miss it is because no one else appears ready to do it. Why not? Expense.
- Alex3917 18y ago
  How many investigative journalists do you think the NY Times employs? IIRC they have about 800 employees, so maybe 100 tops. Let's say the cost of employing them is 20M per year. Last year the NYT made 6 million on revenue of 748 million, which means their costs must be 742 million. This makes Seth's numbers roughly correct.
  - lliiffee 18y ago
    You seriously believe that 98% of the NYT expenses are consumed by movie reviews, the crossword guy, and David Brooks? Anyway, the fact is, Seth pulled that number out of his ass, and that is irresponsibly sloppy at best. (And, ironically, an excellent example of the kind of thing editors and fact-checkers are for...)
    - anamax 18y ago
      > You seriously believe that 98% of the NYT expenses are consumed by movie reviews, the crossword guy, and David Brooks? You're forgetting the actual paper and the cost of distributing it. We know the revenues (roughly) and that the expenses are about the same. How many actual investigative reporters do you think that the NYT has? Multiply that number by your guess of their average burdended cost and compare that to the total expenses. My guess is that the NYT has at most 30 investigative reporters and they cost, on average, $200k/year. That's $6M. If there are actually 100, that's $20M.
      - lliiffee 18y ago
        Frankly, you are also forgetting about the actual paper and cost of distributing it! I can believe your kind of calculations only in the context of a plausible accounting for all NYT expenses. With out factoring management, lawyers, plane tickets, real estate, etc., you will be way off. BTW 30 is absurdly low. The NYT has more than 30 offices! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_employees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_empl...
        Alex3917 18y ago
        According to Wikipedia the Times only has 350 writers total. It's clear that the majority of these are not doing investigative journalism, they are following the candidates around and rewriting press releases and such. I don't see how the number of actual investigative journalists could possibly be more than 100.
        mynameishere 18y ago
        http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=NYT http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=NYT Full Time Employees: 10,231 The question isn't "writers" but all of the employees involved in actual news creation. I have no idea what it might actually be, but a 1:10 ratio between "operatives" and "support staff" is my guess.
spc476 18y ago
This is actually in reply to the entire thread, but I didn't want it buried deep in nested comments. Anyway, some figures, taken from the New York Times Annual Report and 10-K filing for 2007: http://www.nytco.com/investors/financials/annual_reports.html http://www.nytco.com/investors/financials/annual_reports.htm... From the business.pdf ( http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2007/business.pdf http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2007/business.pdf ) the overall number of employees are 10,231 (4,408 work for the New York Times Media Group---the rest for other newspapers across the country). I estimated the number of reporters at 650 (From here ( http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a... ) people we find that people listed in italics are reporters for the New York Times and not wanting to count across 26 other pages, just counted the number of reporters here, which was 25, and multiplied that by 26 to get my estimate. Crude, but should get us into the right ball park). For just the New York Times that's about 15% of all employees are reporters. So, let's run with that figure. Out of 10,231 employees (at all the newspapers run by this company), that means they have around 1,500 reporters. From the financial statements ( http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2007/fin-stmts.pdf http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2007/fin-stmts.pdf ) we can see that their total expenses are $2,928,070,000. Assuming an average of $200k per reporter (given elsewhere in this thread) that works out to be 10% of expenses (whereas total eages are around 22%). Obviously, an average salary of $100k (remember, these are reporters for various papers around the country) this makes reporter expense 5% of all expenditures. 2% is low, but not by much I would think.

lliiffee 18y ago

2% seems to me laughably low. I would think it is something like 50%. It might take up 2% of the space of a paper, but the reasons we will miss it is because no one else appears ready to do it. Why not? Expense.

Alex3917 18y ago
How many investigative journalists do you think the NY Times employs? IIRC they have about 800 employees, so maybe 100 tops. Let's say the cost of employing them is 20M per year. Last year the NYT made 6 million on revenue of 748 million, which means their costs must be 742 million. This makes Seth's numbers roughly correct.
- lliiffee 18y ago
  You seriously believe that 98% of the NYT expenses are consumed by movie reviews, the crossword guy, and David Brooks? Anyway, the fact is, Seth pulled that number out of his ass, and that is irresponsibly sloppy at best. (And, ironically, an excellent example of the kind of thing editors and fact-checkers are for...)
  - anamax 18y ago
    > You seriously believe that 98% of the NYT expenses are consumed by movie reviews, the crossword guy, and David Brooks? You're forgetting the actual paper and the cost of distributing it. We know the revenues (roughly) and that the expenses are about the same. How many actual investigative reporters do you think that the NYT has? Multiply that number by your guess of their average burdended cost and compare that to the total expenses. My guess is that the NYT has at most 30 investigative reporters and they cost, on average, $200k/year. That's $6M. If there are actually 100, that's $20M.
    - lliiffee 18y ago
      Frankly, you are also forgetting about the actual paper and cost of distributing it! I can believe your kind of calculations only in the context of a plausible accounting for all NYT expenses. With out factoring management, lawyers, plane tickets, real estate, etc., you will be way off. BTW 30 is absurdly low. The NYT has more than 30 offices! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_employees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_empl...
      - Alex3917 18y ago
        According to Wikipedia the Times only has 350 writers total. It's clear that the majority of these are not doing investigative journalism, they are following the candidates around and rewriting press releases and such. I don't see how the number of actual investigative journalists could possibly be more than 100.
        mynameishere 18y ago
        http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=NYT http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=NYT Full Time Employees: 10,231 The question isn't "writers" but all of the employees involved in actual news creation. I have no idea what it might actually be, but a 1:10 ratio between "operatives" and "support staff" is my guess.

spc476 18y ago

This is actually in reply to the entire thread, but I didn't want it buried deep in nested comments. Anyway, some figures, taken from the New York Times Annual Report and 10-K filing for 2007: http://www.nytco.com/investors/financials/annual_reports.html http://www.nytco.com/investors/financials/annual_reports.htm... From the business.pdf ( http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2007/business.pdf http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2007/business.pdf ) the overall number of employees are 10,231 (4,408 work for the New York Times Media Group---the rest for other newspapers across the country). I estimated the number of reporters at 650 (From here ( http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a... ) people we find that people listed in italics are reporters for the New York Times and not wanting to count across 26 other pages, just counted the number of reporters here, which was 25, and multiplied that by 26 to get my estimate. Crude, but should get us into the right ball park). For just the New York Times that's about 15% of all employees are reporters. So, let's run with that figure. Out of 10,231 employees (at all the newspapers run by this company), that means they have around 1,500 reporters. From the financial statements ( http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2007/fin-stmts.pdf http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2007/fin-stmts.pdf ) we can see that their total expenses are $2,928,070,000. Assuming an average of $200k per reporter (given elsewhere in this thread) that works out to be 10% of expenses (whereas total eages are around 22%). Obviously, an average salary of $100k (remember, these are reporters for various papers around the country) this makes reporter expense 5% of all expenditures. 2% is low, but not by much I would think.