'A Bankrupt Media Company Is Better Than a Government Funded One'
In a SPIEGEL interview, Mathias Döpfner, the 46-year-old CEO of Germany's Axel Springer, Europe's biggest newspaper group, discusses the press crisis in the United States, whether governments should subsidize ailing media and the future of journalistic quality on the Internet"
The internet is, if anything, more popular in some foreign countries. Does popularity of the Internet correlate with newspaper failure? It seems to me that sites like Huff may be the savior at least for online news by acting as a sort of newsmedia superstore. Of ocurse this assumes that enough traffic will come to good sources or that Huff -the-Magic-Portal will encourage subscribers as well as headline readers.
The problem is very real here in Seattle. I did a back of the envelope calculation about the annual cost of maintianing a good newspaper based ONLY on the reporting and writing staff. The result looks something like this:
Reporters
- sports 3
- business 3
- police 5
- schools 1
- Olympia 3
- Seattle 5
- art, theater, 3 ..................................... 23 @ 60K $1.4 million
Sectys, copyeds 4 ........................................ @ 50k $2 million
sales and ads 4 ........................................ @ 90k $2.36 million
columnists, wires, etc ................................................. $2.8 million
overhead costs ................................................. 60% $4.3 million
$4.3 million
While these numbers look goofy to me, I suspect they are not all that wrong and if so it is hard to imagine enough advertising to support a free web based paper.
2 comments:
I would juggle, rearrange, and add beats, but the money figure would still be daunting.
Yrs.,
Clark Humphrey
My objective was to arrive at a MINIMAL estimate of the cost .. and this is w/o any profit!
I thibnk beats are a greast idea but I wonder if they could not be covered as Goldy suggests by a network of blogs PLUS a central reporting staff.
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