Posted 11:13 AM by Gene

Preposterous:

Newspapers have cut their spending on journalism by about $1.6B annually

That's not jernalism, that's salaries. This also includes a lot of duplicate editors and reporters and lots and lots of ad-blurbists. And let us remember -- the press was still pretty bad $1.6 billion ago.

Even the author of this specious factoid admits to it:

Newsroom spending, by the way is 80 to 90 percent salaries. It also includes fees for wire service and freelance contributions, as well as a travel and training budget....

These raw numbers, you may already be thinking, don't tell the full story. Even stalwart newspaper enthusiasts would admit that some of the trimmed spending and positions were expendable with little impact on quality for readers. The industry is still hacking at inefficiencies like having six editors read a single story or sending hundreds of reporters, editors and photographers to the Super Bowl.

The question, then, isn't how much is or isn't spent. The question is what's it being spent on. And the answer now, and $1.6 billion ago, is the same: Mostly the wrong things.