Sam Zell this week announced plans to decrease the size of many of the papers he owns, this is a very supply/demand view of the business, and not all that unexpected. The piece that was unexpected was the direct comparison of number of pages writers for various publications produced on an annual basis:
The review found that reporters at the company’s smaller papers were more productive than those in the biggest markets of Chicago and Los Angeles. Michaels did not address findings for the Chicago Tribune, but said the average Los Angeles Times journalist produced “51 pages” per year, while the average journalist in Baltimore or at the company’s Hartford Courant produced “300 pages” per year.
While I don’t think Zell is heading for the Gawker Media “pay per post” method, or pay per traffic that some blogging syndicates use, my prediction is that the stress felt by writers/editors at local and national publications will continue to go up – they will be asked to do more/create more with the time they have. Reporters are already blogging/podcasting/vblogging their interivews, in some cases they’ll now have to produce more output for print as well. The challenge is maintaining quality along the way – more with less quality is not a good move.
The other must do is finding a way to capture a higher degree of revenue from the web operations, which for many news outlets are driving big traffic. Silicon Alley Insider had an interesting post a bit ago that looked at traffic to people.com compared to tmz and perezhilton – the people site drives WAY more traffic. BUT…the overhead is still super high to produce that content, and my bet is that both tmz and perez sites generate a higher profit per ad than anything on the people.com site.