Capitol Fax.com - Your Illinois News Radar » Afternoon-evening blog reading

Thursday, Jun 5, 2008 - Posted by Rich Miller

* I’ve just been reading through Aaron Chambers’ excellent post from earlier this morning. It’s all about the immediate future and what we might expect. Make sure to check it out.

* IlliniPundit detects a pattern with Obama.

* Chicagoist has a Blagojevich Haiku that’s pretty funny.

* The Tribune bloggers have a piece about some of the bills that have been sent to the guv’s desk.

* RedEye has a post entitled Olympic-sized Embarrassment which is worth a read.

* The Illinois GOP says: Give it back, Rod

* And this is not a link to a blog, but once again, we forgot to post Bernie’s column. Sorry about that.

* This isn’t about blogs, either, but it’s quite a concept…

An analysis of reporter output at Tribune papers showed individual productivity ranges from 51 pages a year per writer (at the Los Angeles Times) to more than 300 pages (at the Hartford Courant and the Baltimore Sun), Mr. Michaels said.

“You find out you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content,” he said. […]

“We think that by being able to produce less editorial content . . . we can save a lot of money by producing the right-sized newspaper,” he said.

The bean counters are now firmly in control.

14 Comments

- Rob_N - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 4:37 pm:
Re: the Trib’s abacus telling them some papers can get reporters to produce 51 pages vs others producing 200 pages per year…

I wonder if they care about the quality of the material being printed on those pages.

Heck, a computer using Google can come up with 300 pages of info on a given topic in 0.024 seconds… most of it will be dreck.

- Rob_N - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 4:38 pm:
Sorry, first line should read 51 vs 300 pages per year.

- Anonymous - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 4:39 pm:
Start with the Editorial Boards! Their output is only 365 pages per year among the whole lot of them! That’s, what, 20 pages per year at the Tribune editorial board’s population? I’m sure they’ll find employment easily enough elsewhere, they’re S-M-A-R-T. And they know EVERYTHING.

- Rich Miller - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 4:44 pm:
Kinda harsh, but I get your point.

- wordslinger - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 5:00 pm:
What’s more amazing than “the concept” is that Michaels spoke about it publicly. The Battleship Tribune is listing badly — and plenty are trying to abandon ship.

- problem - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 5:01 pm:
“Heck, a computer using Google can come up with 300 pages of info on a given topic in 0.024 seconds… most of it will be dreck.”

Ahh, I see you’ve heard of the Rich Miller 3000.

(jk )

- Rich Miller - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 5:18 pm:
I suppose I deserved that today. Touché. LOL.

- so-called "Austin Mayor" - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 5:55 pm:
Rich,

A while back your QTD asked what law would we like to see enacted in Illinois — I’d like to see mandatory flogging and banishment for anyone who uses the word “right-sized” in any context.

– SCAM
so-called “Austin Mayor”
http://austinmayor.blogspot.com

- Anonymous - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 6:00 pm:
I second that, along with the flippant and over-used “less is more”, especially by those who can’t read or write very well.

- jaundiced eye - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 6:29 pm:
Hey Problem, don’t pick on Rich. Better comparisons would be Kass, Sneed or Steinberg.

- South Side Mike - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 7:56 pm:
Has anyone looked at the 300 pages produced by small town papers? It’s easy to write 5 stories about Aunt Susie’s ice cream socials than some of the more complex, more spread out coverage of major metropolitan areas. Yes, some people could certainly produce more copy. But to say the reporting ranks of the papers are over staffed is laughable.

- Bookworm - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 8:18 pm:
Oh Lord… I remember working for a small daily that was deemed by the corporate bean counters to be “overstaffed” with three full time reporters covering a three-county area with a total population of over 100,000.
In reality we usually had only two or even one reporter to cover that area because every one of those reporters (including me) had a very chaotic family life and very little money to deal with it. One of us was always sick, or had a sick child, or a sick or dying parent, or a car breakdown, or an injury requiring emergency surgery, etc. Yet each of us usually managed to crank out two to three stories a day, 6 days a week, in spite of it all. I don’t know how we did it and I couldn’t do it forever — that’s why I left.

- Anonymous - Thursday, Jun 5, 08 @ 10:29 pm:
Southside’s got a great point. I’ll retract my previous statement. Less IS more.

- Vote Quimby! - Friday, Jun 6, 08 @ 7:36 am:
I consider myself fortunate to be able to watch the remaining death spasms of the newspaper industry from the sidelines.

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