This story says it will shut down print production and keep only about 20 staff members who will move to its online-only product. How does a news-gathering organization cover the northwestern U.S., or even a city the size of Seattle, with only 20 people?
If someone's willing to buy ad space on its web site, how much will they be willing to pay? And if they've got only 20 staffers, what kind of reporting are they going to be able to do? Among the 20 staffers, there would surely be a handful of editors who oversee news gathering, but don't actively engage in it themselves.
It's not clear whether those 20 staffers also include advertising sales staff, but it sounds like it. How many reporters does that leave? Five or six? Maybe 10?
I hope I'm wrong, but it would seem the quality of coverage would suffer from serious understaffing and lead to a serious decline in online traffic.
Hearst apparently has some sort of new type of media site in mind for the Post-Intelligencer that would rely heavily on news from city hall and the courts, blogs from residents, columns and photo galleries. Newspapers have been increasingly relying on diversions like amateur neighborhood blogs and photo galleries to jazz up their online product, but I'm not sure how these things fit into the mission of a news-gathering organization.
Maybe I'm biased, but photo galleries of people's pets dressed in silly costumes don't seem to me to be a compelling reason to visit a newspaper's web site. I also question the value of news digests mixed with opinion in the form of amateur blog posts.
Let us hope this is not the future of American newspapers.
