How Much Money Does A Newspaper Have To Make To Stave Off The 'Ghosting'?

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So.

How much money does a local newspaper have to make to stay robust enough that it can actually produce more than fluff and wire copy that folks actually want and are willing to pay for, either in digitial or dead tree form?

Well, if the paper is part of conglomerate it turns out that nobody knows.

Marc Tracy of the money making Grey Lady has the story:

Phil Luciano, a columnist at The Peoria Journal Star, got a story tip recently about Caterpillar, the heavy equipment company that was based in Peoria, Ill., for 90 years before a recent relocation to Cook County.

The tip seemed promising enough. But as one of only seven full-time reporters at the paper, he felt stretched too thin to do much about it.

“Who’s our Caterpillar reporter?” Mr. Luciano asked. “We don’t have one right now.”

In recent years, The Journal Star has been hit with the kind of cutbacks that have become common for newspapers nationwide as they steer a bumpy course toward a digitally focused future. The newsroom had more than 80 guild employees in the 1990s, and now has about a dozen.

The Journal Star is still the largest paper in downstate Illinois. But after covering more than 23 counties in its heyday, it now limits itself to three: Peoria, Tazewell and Woodford...

{snip}

...“I know The Journal Star’s in the black,” Mr. Luciano said. “How much in the black do you have to be? That’s what drives us up a wall.”...


Why?

Hedge funds vultures.

That's why:

...The job of top editor has lost some of its old luster in this era of job cuts and hedge fund ownership. A vocation that once had a dash of grit and glamour has become more administrative, with a lot of bean-counting and heartbreak.

Neil Chase, the former executive editor of the Bay Area News Group, said that the news organization he oversaw regularly received profit targets from its owner, Digital First News — now known as MediaNews Group, a company controlled by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. To hit those targets, he had to slash costs.

During Mr. Chase’s tenure, from 2016 to the start of this year, layoffs and attrition cut the newsroom to around 165 from an already diminished staff of 240, he said.

Mr. Chase and his team tried to preserve the company’s core publications, The Mercury News in San Jose and The East Bay Times. And so the group’s weeklies — titles like The Walnut Creek Journal and The Los Gatos Weekly-Times — took a big hit.

“We gutted those papers by taking the journalism out of them,” said Mr. Chase, now chief executive of CALmatters, a nonprofit covering California state politics.

Those weeklies are now among the nation’s ghost papers. A typical issue contains items from stringers tucked in among articles from Bay Area News Group dailies...


And yet, here in Canada, rather than helping the scrappers and fighters who are trying to do more than generate empty 'ghost papers', we are all in for giving a leg up to the vultures.

Go figure.


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