Clay Shirky does content analysis of his hometown newspaper and is dismayed to find that, “most of the substantive part of that day’s Trib wasn’t locally created, and most of it wasn’t news.” Only six bylines appeared on local hard news stories. Which Shirky found odd, until he realized that six reporters constituted the entire hard news staff of the paper, even though there were 65 total employees. Referring to Steve Coll’s early musings on the merits of non-profit journalism, Shirky concludes:
For people who see newspapers as whole institutions that need to be saved, their size (and not the just the dozens and dozens of people on the masthead, but everyone in business and operations as well) makes ideas like Coll’s seems like non-starters — we’re talking about a total workforce in the hundreds, so non-profit conversion seems crazy.
All that changes, though, if you start not from total head count but from a list of the people necessary for the production of Jones’ “iron core of news,” a list that, in the Columbia Daily Tribune’s case, would be something like a dozen. (To put this in perspective, KBIA, Columbia’s NPR affiliate, lists a staff of 20.)
Seen in that light, what’s needed for a non-profit news plan to work isn’t an institutional conversion, it’s a rescue operation. There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model. With that framing of the problem, the question is how to get them out safely, and if that’s the question, Coll’s idea starts to look awfully good.
