Journalists Do The Math
As a journalist still early in my career (I’ve only been out in the full time working world for less than a year), I feel I have more questions to ask than answers to give about the news business. There is so much you don’t learn in undergrad. Part of me is trying to digest everything I’ve been seeing and experiencing – I still don’t know what to make of it all.
Lately I’ve been thinking about numbers. The number of dollars it takes to run a newsroom, the number of people needed to manage the work, the number of viewers to make the ratings, the number of hits a website needs to succeed…
Undergrad was so dreamy! (For me, at least). Writing, and reading, and producing, and reporting is so exciting! And learning to put it all together in a final product is the best part. But now I know the business side of journalism is arguably equally as important (if not more!) than the writing, especially with smaller budgets, job cuts, reorganization, and extreme downsizing. I’m not sure what to blame it on -- the economy or the evolution of a “one-man band” (the photographer, writer, editor, reporter all in one person… [I’m glad I’m prepared for that!]), or maybe the idea of less paper and more digital. Either way, one conclusion I’ve come up with is that j-schools need to teach us how to handle the number side of the news – how driven newsrooms are by numbers; the goal for a larger number of viewers for less number of dollars.
Numbers are the reason why Al Jazeera English is struggling. The number of employees leaving, the number American households it failed to reach, the financial cutbacks the channel is experiencing. David Marash cited the anti-American editorial direction that the channel is choosing to go as the reason for his recent resignation. (Marash is one of around 15 who quit Al Jazeera English). But maybe it’s more about the lack of appeal from the audience the channel was trying to capture. While it reaches many viewers in the Middle East, the channel has not reached cable distribution in the United States. It hasn’t peaked the interest of a substantial amount of viewers in the UK… and with BBC’s announcement of a new Arab language channel, money, viewers, and employees matter more than ever. Let’s hope in time the 16-month-old channel can rebuild itself and offer itself up to more English speaking viewers. (I guess time is a number too…)
For a journalism student, math is usually optional… but for a newsroom, it’s essential! Paula Zahn was right when she told our CNN intern class, “you live by numbers and you leave by them.” It happened to her.... What a cruel awakening.