Quality V Profit

The bottom line results for News Organisations are often enhanced to the detriment of quality journalism and this blog has often bemoaned the decline in quality journalism

Philip Stone (via Follow the Media ) looks critically at the newspaper strategy of improving the bottom line by means of reducing the number of journalists it employs.

They

pray for the day when digital revenue gains will begin
to exceed print revenue losses. Then everything will be all right? Well, bottom
line, yes; print journalistic product, definitely no!

But does it actually work

"

the main effort goes to the Internet and with less
journalists working local beats, indeed less and smaller-sized pages, less news
hole and the like then how can anyone say with a straight face that most US
newspapers are of the same journalistic quality that they once were?
"

Does it matter to the people of Los Angeles, for
instance, that the Times has seen several Pulitzer Prize journalists recently
leave the newspaper for greener pastures. It should, their print newspaper has
lost great quality reporting

And in Britain from a former Indy journalist

In those days there were two health correspondents, a
social services correspondent, a science writer, technology writer, another
science writer, religious affairs writer, transport writer, labor writer,
environment writer …and they were all different people. Now there’s a health
writer, science writer, environment writer. Nobody is doing religion,
technology, transport, labor. It’s not just cut to the bone – it’s down to the
heart and lungs, kept going in some sort of vat with the brain possibly
attached,”