1972 all over?

From Slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2169763/

The gist of it is, newsroom staffs got artificially large over the last 30 years or so, and we'll still be able to put out a quality product with fewer bodies. Bad for journalists, but not much different for the reader. Wasn't in the business 30 years ago, so I don't have much to add.

 

Paging DyePack ... OH WAIT! ;D

 

Here's hoping not a lot o publishers read this. They come up with the ideal of more wire copy and fewer journalists is the way to say money. From some of the cuts in the past couple of years, maybe some of them are already thinking that way.

 

The connection between quality and head count would seem intuitive, but a dip into the microfilm archives of the New York Times and Washington Post shows that decent newspapers have been produced with far fewer hands.

Yeah, and baseball owners can use creative accounting to show they are "losing money."

"Far fewer hands" can mean a lot of things, but it gets tricky when you compare the days when you had people cutting and pasting and laying out copy after you drew it on the dummies and sent it in the tube and started working on the next story or the next page or the next photo.

Not to mention there were "far fewer" sports regularly covered ...