News Investment
Gathering large-scale information on investments in ethnic newsrooms is difficult. There is no measurement of staffing and investment in “ethnic media newsrooms.” Drilling down farther, there are no real figures on Korean-American or Indian-American media. Most of these outlets have small staffs.
The Hispanic media, however, do collect data through the Latino Print Network. And while stories on significant staff moves among the big Hispanic broadcasters may not detail investment and staffing figures, they at least lay out the contours and general directions of news investment.
According to figures from the Latino Print Network, overall staffing (full- and part-time) at Hispanic daily newspapers was down in 2006 for the first time since 2003 – 4,174 total staff in 2006 vs. 4,536 in 2005. For weeklies, the figure also was down in 2006, to 4,249 from 4,269 in 2005. At less-than-weeklies, the figure climbed slightly, to 1,939 in 2006 from 1,918 in 2005.
The decline looks especially noticeable among dailies – the drop of 362 staffers equals about 8% of the 2005 total. But the Latino Print Network collected data from four fewer dailies in 2006. The result is that the actual per-daily decline is not so dramatic. On average there were two more staffers at the Hispanic dailies for which the network gathers data – 110 in 2006 vs. 108 in 2005. Weeklies had a slight decline in average staff size – from 12 in 2005 to 11 in 2206. Less-than-weeklies held steady at six staff members.
And the staffers at daily and weekly newspaper are slightly less busy, according to the network’s data, thanks, in part, to thinner publications. The data show the “average pages per staff per issue” down at dailies, to 0.9 pages per staffer in 2006 from 1.2 pages in 2005. Weeklies also saw a slight drop, with the average pages per staffer at 5.0 in 2006, down from 5.3 in 2005. In theory, this means staffers have more time to devote to individual stories, with the hope of improving on quality.
For less-than-weeklies, where staffs are usually smallest, the publications got thicker and the workload increased substantially, to 6.9 pages per issue in 2006 from 3.8 pages in 2005. Those numbers may be a sign that these publications, usually found in emerging ethnic communities, are growing rapidly. In time, they may stabilize their publication schedules and increase staff.
Footnotes
1. All staffing figures from the Latino Print Network: State of Hispanic Print, 2006 |
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