I shot an email to Paul Kauppila, a reference librarian that works specifically with the school of journalism here at SJSU. The resources he pointed me to were invaluable (a list of which I will post PDQ), and I ended up crawling on my hands and knees bookhunting through the section of the library that dealt with newspaper issues.

I found something.

It was out of date, but it was the first hard numbers I came across. According to Philip Meyer in an essay that appears in “-30-: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper” (page 75), a typical newspaper of 100,000 circulation in 2001 would have annual operating costs that look like this:

And income looked like this in 2000:

The advertising income was split up like this:

The obvious problem is, these are extremely outdated figures now. The newspaper industry has seen a drastic shift even since these 2001 figures were compiled, and especially with the rise of sites such as Craigslist and CareerBuilder that took away significant classified dollars from a newspaper’s gross income.

I mean, take a look here. Not too long ago, classifieds earned 40% of an entire newspaper’s income. Just to break even on that $55.48 million of operating expenses, classifieds would have to earn $22.2 million a year. Just classifieds. That was easy back in the day when newspapers had a monopoly on classified listings. That income has been since practically decimated.

I know there are updated numbers floating out there somewhere. Complicated Google searches didn’t turn them up in time to write my accounting paper on this subject, but the reference librarian forwarded me these links that I am going to delve into in order to continue this series: The Newspaper Guild, the National Newspaper Association, the Newspaper Association of America and the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The next post will list some of the books and scholarly research we were able to dig up.

UPDATE: Bingo. Updated figures are here. I will expound later when I have a chance to digest.

ANOTHER ETA: I just found this fantastic interview with Craig Newmark. He is personally keen in saving quality journalism, even though his Craigslist is scapegoated for killing the news industry. Read his comments here.

So in the accounting class required for my minor, I’ve been asked to write a paper on anything my pretty little heart desired, as long as it had something to do with accounting. Naturally, I pick the future of the journalism industry, and in particular newspapers.

I just “finished” the paper and turned it in, but it is in no way finished. I have more stuff to find out and more resources than I know what to do with (with the help of my new BFF, the journalism department’s dedicated librarian). So I want to start a series of blog posts, adding to the cacophany of already-established journalism bloggers who write about the future of journalism.

But here I want to emphasize hard numbers above lofty ideals, because frankly hard numbers scare me but that’s what we all need to look at. Journalists and math tend to go together like oil and water, but it’s the math that’s needed and sorely missing from the online resources I found. I suck at math, too, but I’m willing to push the data and discussions in a cohesive place and open it for discussion.

So I hope this works, and I hope this discovery process helps others too. Let me know if you know of any resources.