Media critic Clay Shirky recently conducted a study in which he literally weighed how much local hard news his hometown paper, the Columbia Daily Tribune, produced in one day. His findings: With a staff of 59, his hometown paper, which has a circulation of about 100,000, had only six local news reporters, and in the edition he looked at, those six reporters produced nine stories, 1/6th of the total content in that day’s edition.

Shirky’s point is that if you want to convert a newspaper into a nonprofit news operation, you can’t do a wholesale institutional conversion because the all-in-one model is failing. Instead, he argues, you must “rescue” the handful of journalists who are reporting on hard local news, along with a small number of support staff for those reporters, from the rest of the failing newspaper bundle (sports, columns, horoscopes, lifestyle section, etc.).

I agree with the idea that if you were to start a nonprofit aimed preserving local news reporting, you definitely should aim for a narrower focus than what newspapers have traditionally offered. However, Shirky’s post brings to mind a similar study that raises questions for me on this topic.

Back in March, Jay Rosen did an impromptu survey, asking people to count how many locally produced news stories were in their local newspaper. In his post, Rosen explains part of the impetus for the survey:

Geoff Dougherty, who runs a news start-up in Chicago, said in this comment thread that the Chicago Tribune had that day published eight homegrown, original-reporting-required non-sports stories. (I followed up with him by email and got his counting rules correct.)

In the comment thread that Rosen refers to, Dougherty said:

Today the Trib ran eight local stories. We’ll run the same number tomorrow with a staff of four and a couple of freelancers and volunteer neighborhood reporters.

That would seem to support Shirky’s conclusion. However, here’s the epilogue on that story: Dougherty’s nonprofit start-up, Chi-Town Daily News, closed shop in September when he couldn’t raise enough money and decided to abandon it and pursue a for-profit venture instead. Note that we’re not talking about a big operation here. Chi-Town Daily News’ contact page lists a staff of six — two in management and four reporters. And after four years, it could not raise more than $300,000 a year (and as Nieman Journalism Lab reports, even that is a great accomplishment).

That brings me to my next point: How should we look at the fact that the Columbia Daily Tribune has six local news reporters in its staff of 59? Is that number too small, or is that number what this market can support? How many reporters can a nonprofit focusing exclusively on local news in this market afford? If you can’t raise enough money in a market the size of Chicago to sustain a nonprofit with four reporters focusing on local hard news, what are the chances of you being able to do that in a much smaller market in Columbia, Missouri? Of course, Chi-Town Daily News is but one example, so we should probably refrain from drawing sweeping conclusions from its fate (and there are some nonprofit local news operations that have fared better in fundraising). But I do believe these are questions worth asking.

In that light, then, should we view the non-local news portions of the Columbia Daily Tribune as burdens weighing down the operation’s core mission of local news reporting by adding expenses, or are those parts actually generating the money that makes it possible to have those six local news reporters? What is the nature of the relationship between the news and non-news portions of a news operation? Who’s propping up who here?

My feeling on this is that, relative to a market’s size, the number of paid, full-time, local hard news-gathering journalists it can support is relatively small, regardless of the business model. I’m for whichever model brings us closest to that number in a particular market. From that perspective, how much of the content in a newspaper is local new isn’t really the right question to ask. Rather, we should be asking how close that amount is to the local news-gathering capacity this market can support and whether a nonprofit model can get us closer to that capacity.

Related Notes

A couple other points about the Columbia Daily Tribune’s staff of 59:

• The count of 59 is actually misleadingly high. Shirky pointed out that there were a lot of columnists, but just from clicking on those columnists’ names on the Tribune’s staff page, I could see that 16 out of 24 columnists are guest columnists who have full-time jobs elsewhere, not really part of the newspaper’s staff. I don’t know how much the Tribune pays its guest columnists, but at the papers I worked in newspapers in the early to mid-2000s, a sports correspondent generally got anywhere from $50 to $100 per story, and I know at least one of our guest columnists got less.
• I don’t know much about the sports scene in the Tribune’s coverage area, but the 11-person sports department does seem a bit high. My former paper, which has three major Division I schools, a FCS D-I school, an NHL team, a high-profile minor-league baseball team, and about 15-20 high schools within 20-some miles of its office has a sports staff of five full-timers and one part-timer.
• However, I found it odd that Shirky wrote “There are also eleven people covering sports, including one assigned just to cover the area high schools.” If my former paper, whose circulation has dipped to the 30,000 range, has 15-20 high schools in its coverage area, I can only imagine how many high schools are in a 100,000-circulation paper’s area. Having one person to cover that beat is likely barely enough, and as much as some might dismiss sports as “not news”, it’s also widely acknowledged that prep sports is something that matters to local readers, not to mention the fact that it’s something relatively unique to the local paper, usually with few substitutes.