Via Matthew Ingram (I’m catching up on RSS feeds), Jack Shafer has makes an important observation about today’s prestige newspapers: their staffs are significantly larger than in the glory days of the 1970s. Although Shafer’s original piece overstated the case, the numbers are still significant: The New York Times has apparently grown from 500 reporters and editors to 750, while the Washington Post has grown from 340 to 550. In other words, each is about 50 percent larger than it was in the 1970s.
Shafer then quotes Post and Times officials explaining why news would suffer from a reduction in headcount to 1970s levels. Apparently fluff stories are bigger revenue drivers than they were in the 1970s, so the hard news headcount would have to be cut below 1970s levels to keep the paper profitable.
But I think this dramatically underestimates how much easier a reporter’s job is today than in the 1970s. There’s a wealth of original materials available online that makes fact-checking easier. There’s a massive distributed reporting system called the blogosphere that helps reporters dig up leads and provide instant feedback. There are people all over the place with cell phones capable of capturing photos and even video. There are sites like YouTube and Flickr that help aggregate and organize this wealth of material.
Obviously, there are still some stories where there’s no substitute for picking up the phone and calling sources, or for hopping on a plane to see a story first-hand. We still need some reporters to do that. But the job of a reporter these days is far more oriented toward synthesizing and summarizing the material that’s already out there. Much of the information is already out there, and the job of a reporter is simply to translate sometimes technical source documents into plain English.
Moreover, one of the points Shafer make is that the Times and the Post relied far more on wire stories in the 1970s than they do today. There’s no reason to think there’d be much loss in story quality if reporters did more of this today. The Times could cut its staff covering technology and instead feature content from CNet or Wired (obviously, they’d want to feature some of CNet’s less geeky or esoteric content, but I’m sure CNet would be happy to produce some less-geeky stories to accommodate them). Many large web properties already do this, but there’s every reason to think this process could continue without significantly harming the quality of news coverage.
The next decade may bring wrenching adjustments for reporters used to secure positions at large newspapers, but there’s little reason to think that the quality of news will suffer as a result. Quite the contrary, thanks to the Internet, the average American has access to far more and better news than he did 20 years ago. Any diminution of the quality of newspaper reporter will be small compared with the benefits of being able to choose from dozens of high-quality news sites.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.