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Comment by jsherry | Hacker News Reader

I still think that the number one threat to professional journalists is the low barrier to entry for people to get into journalism these days, not robots. That said, this is really interesting and will likely play a role in generating content from structured data (like baseball stats) at some point in the relatively near future.

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My take, as a professional journalist:

The number one threat to professional journalists is the fact that newspaper readership has shifted from print to online, but revenue has not.

Until news companies figure out how to make as much money per online reader as they used to make per print reader, the journalism world is going to continue to be in trouble.

I've never really understood this. The cost of keeping our website up is not even a percent of what it costs to lay out, print and distribute one dead tree issue. We don't need as much money as we once did. It just looks like a reluctance to adjust to me.

Are you including the cost of people? That is, the cost of paying people to maintain the servers, develop the backend and design the frontend?

> Are you including the cost of people? That is, the cost of paying people to maintain the servers, develop the backend and design the frontend?

They're a lot cheaper than people involved in printing paper and distributing it.

Can we put numbers on this? Even ballpark numbers. Because I'm thinking that if you have one system admin, one frontend dev, and one backend dev, that will cost at least $200,000 a year. That assumes that the cost of each person is at least $66,666 a year - that is how much they cost, not how much they are paid. I think that's a very low number, both in terms of number of people and in how much they cost.

Here's a ballpark:

http://ask.metafilter.com/73789/Cost-of-printing-national-ne...

And that's just printing, not counting the physical paper design folk, who also cost money and who actually are needed to design each individual issue (as opposed to website developers, who I maintain are not needed constantly to update a site whose primary product is not software).

Developing the backend and designing the front-end are essentially fixed costs, which amount to little more than the cost of printing a couple of paper issues of a fairly small publication.

Good sites (such as the NY Times) are continually innovating their front and backend.

I know the NYT spends a lot of money on its site, but that's just their choice. It's nice, but usually not strictly necessary for the purpose of delivering news online, and I don't think the NYT's site is really that much better than if you secretly switched its CMS to Brand X. If they want to constantly throw money into that pit and then complain about their financial woes, I guess that's their call, but I would personally prefer to focus on things with a good ROI.

While web production costs may be lower than print-edition production costs ... the cost of editors, reporters, photographers, etc. -- that is, the people who actually produce the content -- remains the same.

Actually, it may even be more, since you've also got videographers and programmers and other content-producing positions that did not exist at most newspapers before the Web ... as well as a 24/7 news cycle, rather than just a one- or two-edition daily cycle.

Your average newspaper does not need huge squads of full-time programmers, sysadmins and videographers. I know several that are transitioning from an over-engineered third-party solution to a $50/mo VPS with WordPress. I'm our only in-house programmer, with freelancers filling in where it's needed. Is it the most amazing website ever? No, but it's capable of delivering the news (24/7, no less). If you want a little less seat-of-your-pants, you'd need maybe one or two more people. The overhead of running a website is substantially less than the overhead of printing ink on paper with expensive equipment and physically driving it all around town.

Yes, you'll still need to pay for reporters, but those have always been dirt cheap. Yes, there will still be costs, but I didn't say it was free — just that the Web is not this absolute harbinger of doom the industry thinks it is. They're just not adapting well to the new environment.

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