The Newsroom That Spends More, Earns More

The first good news story about the newspaper industry that I’ve read in a while and I sure hope it ends up on the desk of editors and publishers of the country’s finest newsrags.

My colleagues and feel acutely futile arguing that rampant job-cutting at newspapers not only lowers the quality of the rag, but shrinks profits in the long run (we’re months from graduating, J-school, so give us a break), Finally, there’s a study to back us up.

The upside for papers to hire, hire, hire:

“If you invest in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes,” Esther Thorson, an advertising professor and associate dean for graduate studies at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, said in a statement.

Reuters discloses the ugliness of the recent management of the news media industry that is (I pray) at its nadir.

According to job outplacement tracking firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number of planned job cuts in the U.S. media sector surged 88 percent to 17,809 last year.

Since the start of 2007, Time Warner Inc.’s Time Inc. said it would cut 289 jobs, and the New York Times Co. announced plans to shed 125 jobs and close foreign bureaus for its Boston Globe newspaper.

“Until recently, people have been doing it because the results looked good to investors on Wall Street, but it’s… ignoring the long-term aspects,” said marketing professor and study co-author Murali Mantrala.

The study (which I can find no mention of on the Missouri site) will be published in April’s Journal of Marketing