How small can a staff be shrunk?

With the 25 percent cut in San Francisco and the draconian cuts in San Jose, both big city regional papers are looking at newsrooms of around 300.

How small can you take it before you realize that you just cut your way into oblivion and don't have enough bodies to answer all the complaint calls that keep coming in about stuff not getting covered?

Do these bean counters think that if they just keep cutting, at some point they'll hit a magic number where circulation starts going up again?

If I'm rich, I move into those cities, start a news Web site, hire a skeleton crew of reporters and outreport those papers on stuff they can't cover.

 

The bean counters everywhere (or almost everywhere) believe that things can be covered just as well by stringers than regular staffers. Thus keep the amount of coverage up (quality be damned) and save money by using stringers instead of a staffer (who would actually get paid vacations, health insurance, a 401k and all those other expensive benefits)

 

I said it before and I'll say it again -- newspapers are dying because bean-counters and higher-ups with no long-term vision are killing them.
We are still relevant. We still make a ton of money for them. It's just not as much as it used to be, and many are too dumb to see the ways to keep it going.

 

Just as a point of math, San Jose long ago dwindled below 300 in the newsroom.