Media: ‘Hey, buddy! Can you spare $2 million?’
Posted in On the Media with tags blogs, citizen journalism on February 24, 2009 by Billy DennisThe guy who runs Chi-Town Daily News — an all online news site — is causing a mini-sensation with his assertion that with as little as $2 million a year, his site could create a newsroom that could replace the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. I’m not going to argue with his numbers,* but I agree with his premise.
I’ve been saying this for years.
Online distribution of the news is vastly more efficient, more user friendly and far less expensive than newspapers. The value in a newspaper is NOT that is printed on paper. It’s value is in the news itself. But the companies that own newspapers base their profits on the fact that it costs too much money for anyone to compete with them. Then the Internet came along and buggy-whipped that business model. Now, newspapers are tossing all their content online for free, thus making it hard for anyone else to come along and compete with online start-ups that are funded with small subscription fees.
* Actually, I think the guy is kidding himself if his thinks the costs of lawyers, accounts, etc. is going to be negligible. And he may not be spending money on a staff that sells ads, but public radio and television DO have employees devoted to doing nothing but talking people and organizations out of their nickles and dimes. And some of their support comes from taxpayers.
A buddy and I sat down once and jotted down on a napkin how much we estimated it would cost per year to operate a for-profit online news organization with two full-timers and a handful of part-timers and interns. It was close to $100,000 as I recall. Meanwhile, a handful of citizen journalists in Peoria is doing a halfway decent job watching the watchers already.