Trim NYT newsroom to just 50 writers? Yep, TechCrunch is half in jest—but you never know about Wall Street
“The New New York Times, or NNYT, would have a writing staff of say 50 people. These are among the best journalists in the world, and lets say they wanted to pay themselves $200,000/year, a top salary for a reporter of that stature. That’s just $10 million a year in payroll expenses. Call it $12 million with benefits. Plus, they all have stock options in the new comapny.”
So writes TechCrunch founder J. Michael Arrington—complete with the “lets say” and the “new comapny.” A publication of any size can use copy editors (a job description I dearly wish we had at TeleRead).
TechCrunch has its merits, and, yes, Michael is semi-joking when he says that the Times could follow the example of The Politico and slim down. He says the latter has a news room of just “100 strong,” with star writers recruited from the established newspapers. And yet the Politico now draws seven million visitors a month.
Trouble is, the Politico doesn’t really cover government in depth in the genuine sense—just politics, more or less, in an upscale version of the Gawker act. For the fun of it, I’ll list a few headlines in The Politico:
- No free lunch for CEOs at the White House—about the Obama Administration forcing top executives to pull out their credit cards, so to speak.
- Exclusive: Earmark critic steered cash to blimp research—again interesting but hardly a major issue touching the great masses.
- Fat accompli: Congress’s weight tissue—a mix of observations on congressional waistlines and the national obesity crisis. Yes, this will liven up the healthcare debate—might it be cost-effective for more tax money to go toward weight control? But what could be a great sidebar has suddenly become the main story.
Notice? Michael’s really proposing to change the Times into a flashy niche publication. Now here’s the irony. Michael confesses, “I don’t really read the New York Times beyond the tech section.” But wait! With just 50 people for the whole bloody paper, I suspect that the Times tech section will be just a shadow of itself. Even with all those bodies, the tech section is not covering all it could.
“Of course,” Michael concludes, “none of this is going to happen. Those 50 top journalists aren’t going to be able to self select and organize themselves even if they had the inclination to do something like this. But the interesting thing is that I think something like this would work, really work, if anyone tried it. And the guys at Politico and AOL seem to be doing just that. Lean journalism, for the win.”
Simply put, the Arrington post on the New New York Time is a fun read—I’m just worried that Wall Street will take him seriously.
Disclosure: It’s always possible that TeleRead may do content exchange deals or work out other arrangements with the NYT’s owners (its Blogrunner picks up some of our headlines for free—fair use of which I love). But we could also do something with TechCrunch. Evens out.
Related: Michael Wolff on the Politco, from Vanity Fair, and a TechMeme roundup.
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