The Line

By VIOLETTA HEART

Staff writer

No matter how you get your news and information, no matter what the source, no matter where you go for information, there are costs associated with the gathering, processing and delivery of information. Salaries, printing, broadcast, travel, developing, transmission: all this costs money. Where does this money come from?

The obvious answer is from advertisers but, with the advent of internet sources, there are a lot more venues for competition for those diminishing dollars.

Let's take a look at what exactly goes into producing news.

Salaries for a first year journalist are averaging around $30,000 per year. For a first year broadcast journalist, it averages $40,000.  First year newspaper editors make around $50,000 per year.  So on average, run a newspaper with only inexperienced one reporter and inexperienced one editor, you would need $70,000 just for salaries and more for broadcast journalism.

From Ask MetaFilter web site I found this answer to the question of what it costs to print a daily national newspaper:

"Newsprint right now runs about $535 a metric ton (most newsprint comes from Canada) for those companies. You can get about 110 pages per pound, 2205 pounds per metric ton. NYT daily circulation is 1,120,420, Sunday 1,627,062. For a daily paper of 48 pages (regional editions have fewer pages than the metro), NYT prints 48 x 1120420 = 53780160 pages. 53780160 divided by 110 divided by 2205 = 221.7 tons, times $535 = $115,609 in newsprint for a typical day. Plates, ink and labor (and a newsprint waste factor of 5% or so) probably add 25% to this, so figure about $145,000 for the Mon-Sat NYTimes. Probably about 3 times that amount for the Sunday Times."

This equation did not take into account ink, machines, transportation, or delivery.

So, doing that equation, one paper with 48 pages costs to print $.13.  This is just for the paper.  I could not find a definitive answer on what newspaper ink costs but I was able to find a quote from an English source stating that to print the London Times on a daily basis per copy for all materials, it cost 80P or about $1.34 US dollars. Most newspapers sold at kiosks and venders range in price from $.75 to $1 per copy.  Home delivery tended to save subscribers money in the past by reducing the amount spent per copy but as you can see there is a *bit* of a difference between the amount spent by the newspaper to provide the news and the amount spent by the reader to receive the news.

In the past, that difference has been made up by the advertisers.  Column inches were bought, full page color for the weekends were sold, and the traffic came into stores and businesses.  But the internet c hanged all that as well.  Why pay for advertising when you can put up a website, buy a pop up ad, or rely on free sources such as reviews on Dex.com or Craigslist.

Another problem facing journalism today is the view held by the masses that information is free.  Wikipedia, blogs, YouTube, newspapers, CNN, and many more all have their footprint on the internet.  If you know where to look you can get on going, up to date, minute by minute reports on happening news events.  Yet you must wonder where does this news come from?  Who reports it? What is their angle on it?  Where did they train?  And, are you getting the who, what, when, where, and why?

What is the fate of print journalism in this modern time?  Will straight forward news reporting give way to news by opinion column and blogs?  Or will there be a melding of internet sources and straight news reporting to where the readers will be able to reach their own opinions?