SF Chron to be shut down? "It's so Soviet."

Article by Michael Rosenblum: (read the actual one here)


The Heart Corporation announced today that it was going to sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle.

This means that San Francisco could lose its largest and most powerful newspaper.

The Chronicle lost $50 million last year, and has suffered losses every year since 2001.

It make KRON look like a major success story.

If The Chronicle is on the ropes, then there is something wrong with the fundamentals of the news business.

And there is.

And not just newspapers - because where the papers are today, the networks will be tomorrow.

What to do?

About 6 months ago, I was on a panel at one of Jeff Jarvis’ confabs at CUNY in NY, on the future of journalism.

The panel was headed by Andrew Heyward, former Pres of CBS News.

The challenge - design the newsroom of the future.

The room was filled with media luminaries and we began by putting numbers on the board - how many reporters, how many editors, how big a staff - we were at around 250 (which seemed a painful number in and of itself), when one young journalist from a website in Denmark spoke up.

“I think you are all way off”, she said. “I think the number is closer to 30″.

30?

“30 total”. Like any good website today. 30 is a lot.

This small think is traumatic for those who have spent their lives in major journalism institutions like The New York Times or NBC News. 30 is the weekend cleaning staff - maybe.

But like our fixation on big cameras, our fixation on big staffing and big buildings and big infrastructure may be our undoing.

It’s all very Soviet.

In DC we have been running a pilot local TV station for two years, producing a half hour of original programming a day, every day. We have a staff of 7. Total. 6 VJs who work out of their homes. They report. They shoot. They cut and then they upload to a server in our NY office where an editor reviews and assembles their work to make the half-hour.

365 half hours a year.

Total cost: $600,000

Those are pretty impressive numbers.

And it works.

Now maybe you think it’s too lean. Maybe you think you need 8 or 10 reporters. Fine.

There’s lots of room here on the upside.

But what we have gotten rid of is the burdensome infrastructure. We don’t need the building, the desks, the lamps, the coffee machine, the parking lots… or all the transmission and retransmission gear, the edit suites (or when it comes to newspapers - the printing presses, the ink, the paper). Not to mention the layers and layers and layers of management and bureaucracy.

Look at the web!

Look at Wordpress.com. 198,285 bloggers, 183,275 new posts 46,650,198 words today. Today!

If you had to hire enough writers at Chronicle rates and benefits to write 46 million words a day, what would it cost?

Undoable?

The web….just worldpress, does it daily. For nothing!

Embrace the new technology for what it can do.. not how it can be used to replicate what we do already, and the news organizations can not only survive, they can thrive.

But time is running out.