Michael Becker's Library tagged employment →  View Popular

the fall news as an industry paralleling the end of the industrial economy. That’s not just about shedding the means of production and distribution now that they are cost burdens rather than barriers to entry. It’s about the decentralization of journalism as an industrial complex, about news no longer being based solely on employment.

Why did columnists make so much money? Because they recruited readers, and because it wasn’t much money compared to the rest of the operation. Why did they have rewrite boys and typists and gofers? Because lots of newspaper reporters were still barely educated — reporting was a job for people with a high school education — and you needed someone to fix the spelling. (“Never let them know you can type,” my mother’s first editor told her.) Why fix the spelling? Because a bunch of readers have gone to college, and the advertisers badly want those readers. Fact checking? Same story. Why did newspapers have crime reporters and book reporters and theater reporters and society reporters, not just in New York but in Detroit and Denver and Des Moines? Because those columns sold a few papers, sometimes they attracted an advertiser, and the extra pair of hands came cheap.

Why did they have rewrite boys and typists and gofers? Because lots of newspaper reporters were still barely educated — reporting was a job for people with a high school education — and you needed someone to fix the spelling. (“Never let them know you can type,” my mother’s first editor told her.)

the local, online-only newspaper of tomorrow, for a decent-sized city, will have a staff of 20 people. That’s 20 people, period. Perhaps six of them will be “news gatherers.”

But no matter how you fiddle with the numbers, there’s no way that Josephson’s model gets you anywhere close to old newspaper staffing levels, whereby a paper like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer employed 150 people on the editorial side alone.