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COO Randy Michaels, whose background’s in radio, and not radio of any distinction, held a conference call with investors and media reporters on June 5 and made two striking statements. The first was that the company intended to shrink the news hole at its papers to bring the news-content-to-ads ratio to 50-50 (industry-wide it’s usually closer to 60-40). The second was that output as measured in column inches would weigh heavily in the decisions about which staff to boot. Michaels said the average journalist produces about 51 pages a year at the Tribune Company’s LA Times, about 300 pages a year at its Hartford Courant. “If you work hard and produce a lot for us, everything is great,” said Michaels.
The following observations about the news-ad ratio owe a big debt to Doctor, who’s just addressed the subject on an Editor & Publisher podcast and in his own blog. A lot of newspaper advertisers already have one foot out the door, and here’s Michaels proposing to cheapen the environment in which their ads run. Big advertisers like the visual dignity of ads that stand alone on a page surrounded by important news. Reduce the news and you wind up with the cheesy sight of ads surrounded by other ads. And although newspapers have trained their big advertisers over the decades to think of Section A as the place to be — the section with tony national and international news — that’s the news hole in greatest danger of being shrunk. It’s news produced by high-paid, underproductive (by Michaels’s way of thinking) veterans who can be cleared out for an AP digest.
FOOTNOTE: When I calculated above that the Hartford Courant would average some 164 pages an issue if what Randy Michaels said about its staff’s productivity was true, I was supposing that all the news in the paper was staff generated. Of course, that’s ridiculous. Add wire copy and copy from other Tribune Company papers, plus comics and other syndicated features, and we’re surely looking at another 20-30 pages.
