One of the things I notice, looking through the Columbia Tribune masthead, and reading some of the stories, is that a lot of the people listed are part-timers. In many cases, they are very part-time part-timers. In many cases, their real jobs are listed. They have a story or a column filed every week, or every other week, or every month, and if they get paid at all, which they probably don’t, it is probably on the order of a couple of hundred dollars a month or so. As for the sports reporters, when there are no particulars whatsoever provided about someone, and he only publishes sporadically, that is apt to be a tip-off that he is a high-school or college student, an adjunct to the sports team in about the same sense as the cheerleaders. The staff list of fifty-nine people includes people who have not published anything in months. There are about four sports reporters who file something every day, the other seven being part-timers. There are twenty-three columnists, mostly part-timers, so the actual full-time strength is probably only about thirty people.

So let’s count the actual staff. There are one to four photographers (actual number unclear), and there seem to be about eight people who attend to the business of pasting the paper together, pulling down wire service content, syndicated material, etc., in short, blogging by other means, not to mention inserting advertisements. If anything, the single employee with the highest productivity seems to be the “wire editor,” the man who pastes in the AP content, who is effectively doing the same thing a blogger does, only with rather less competition. There are about four nonwriting editors. Thus the effective local journalist strength is something like fifteen, including four sportswriters, and the food, lifestyle, and business editors (writing). These last three will be doing a job shading off into selling advertising or doing PR, producing the kinds of features that local businesses would like to advertise in. They are also the effective supervisors of most of the columnists. One could easily imagine a local advertising agency taking all that work over, and placing a complete package consisting of advertising and food/lifestyle content, either releasing it to newspapers or just distributing it by direct mail. Now, of course, there will be additional employees in the advertising and circulation departments.

That gets us down to ten reporters who are really paid a full salary on a net basis, six hard news reporters and four sports reporters. The paper is _much_ smaller than it appears at first sight. What with one thing and another, the number of news reporters seems roughly commensurate with the proportion of local news versus other kinds of local content. There are also four nonwriting editors, and one can assume that they spend most of their time looking over the shoulders of the news reporters. It is probably a point of pride for them not to understand the advertising/lifestyle/foodie side of the paper. Granted, the nonwriting editors are probably paid more than the reporters, and it is doubtful whether so many are required. The paper notion of a “newshole” probably contributes to editorial infighting, and the operation of Parkinson’s law (“officials make work for each other”). That is, there is a definite space for people to fight over, whereas, in a web publication, everyone has his own indefinitely expansible directory, and it is an act of obvious malice to interfere with someone else’s story. Taken as a whole, it sounds as though the Columbia Tribune is fairly efficient, an advantage of being small. At a larger paper, there would probably be more tendency to rewrite national news from wire service reports without having any firsthand information, more editorial infighting, etc. The Tribune seems to have everything blog-enabled, and to have a fairly active blogger community. In short, it is hard to see what they are doing wrong, given that they have a daily paper edition.

Delivering a daily paper at all implies a certain minimum thickness, which means that, given the size of the town, the paper has to be heavily padded out with wire service material, syndicated material, etc. There might be a case for going to weekly publication, and downsizing to local content. There might be a case for going to a local glossy magazine, something which could be sold for a ten or twenty dollar annual subscription. The idea would be to print only so much material as one expects the reader to keep on an extended basis.