The Recession & The Newsroom

Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor at the New York Times, wrote an interest an interesting article, "Recession, Revolution and a Leaner Times," about the impact the recession is having on the newsroom. Here are some highlights:

• The Times retains the largest newsroom of any American paper — 1,250 reporters, photographers, editors, columnists, graphic artists, Web producers, videographers and more — it is about to cut 100 people through voluntary buyouts and, if needed, layoffs that would happen in the weeks before Christmas.
• Other cuts: The Baltimore Sun had 400 journalists, is now down to 150 journalists. The Los Angeles Times, where a staff of more than 1,100 has been cut nearly in half.
• Rick Edmonds, a scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center in Florida, estimated last month that newspapers have reduced spending on journalism by $1.6 billion a year over the past several years.
• Bill Keller, executive editor, said he is determined to avoid closing foreign or national bureaus and does not expect significant cuts in Washington, DC.
• The Times has already reduced "the support staff, cutting freelance budgets, capping expense-account meals, seeking bargain airfares and hotels, rotating foreign correspondents every five years instead of four, and housing some bureaus in correspondents’ homes rather than downtown offices. The nice car and driver for the London bureau chief? History."
• "The metro staff, with more than 60 reporters, is still the largest, but it has been reduced by nearly 20 percent over a decade. The paper, for example, no longer has correspondents in the state capitals of New Jersey and Connecticut." Much the way the Journal announced that it would close its Boston bureau, shifting some coverage to New York.
• With an around-the-clock news cycle, reporters file throughout the day, and copy can be edited over a smoother cycle.
• Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, said the newsroom cuts and a decision about charging online readers are entirely separate issues. The cuts are “meant to address the immediate, short-term realities of our current economic situation.” Charging for online content, he said, is a strategic issue that “would have little or no impact on our financial results in the short term, but rather position us differently for long-term grow.

Very interesting insight into the newsroom.

With Limited Resources, Should You Spend Them on Social Media or Media Relations?

Check out Experimenting with Twitter: How Newsrooms Are Using It to Reach More Users.

The article, published Sept. 2007, makes the point that "news organizations aren't just writing about Twitter -- they're using it as a publishing resource for readers and journalists. "

For some clients, the real question isn't whether or not you should use Twitter, establish a Facebook page, etc. and maintain a corp. blog, but how to measure the investment and return on the use of resources necessary to generate any kind of "traction."

A good social media campaign takes as much, if not more, time to generate results. For example, you might get followers on Twitter and visitors to your blog, but that same time could be used for media relations that could secure an article.

The people you're most interested in targeting may not read blogs. Or they may not read newspapers.

The answer of the most effective means depends on who you're trying to reach and what media they consume, how they consume it and where.

We've been telling clients to consider repurposing content across different channels. But recently, a client said he never listens to podcasts -- which actually led us to an interesting discussion. In some corporate settings, computers don't have audio cards and don't have iTunes loaded on them, so they can't easily download podcasts.

The question -- whether to allocate resources to a social media over media relations or vice versa -- comes down, for now, to a "it depends."

Of course, last year, the answer was mostly media relations.

What will next year bring? Let me know your thoughts.