The digital newsroom and how news can no longer sustain itself

Let’s kill a myth. The dream of a compact newsroom, able to output a high-intensity general news website doesn’t fly. Numbers simply don’t add up. And here is why.

A favourite topic of mine and one that the "converganists" like to gloss over sometimes.

Nothing replaces the income stream like sales revenue

That's the start of an article via the Monday Note which is sending alarm bells around the media commentators.And why?

Well it is the cost structure of the newsroom.The author argues that in a standard print newsroom

the biggest costs are industrial ones: around 25%-35% for paper and printing; another 30%-40% for distribution; around 18-25% for editorial; the remaining 10-15% are for administrative and marketing expenditures. It varies from country to country but we can safely assert most of the costs — at least 60% — are industrial in nature. Evidently, that part disappears when going online.

Leaving journalists to make up the vast majority of the costs of the digital newsroom.With it so far???

Good -well translated into costs this means that to cover its costs,a purely digital operation will require over 8.3million unique visitors based on a revenue figure per unique visitor of 0.25 euros.

And the conclusion,well even the big operations will struggle to get there.

But

Still, this is no reason to hang on to an inexorably shrinking print media.

and

news is no longer able to sustain itself. The game becomes finding “alternate subsidy” streams