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If 600 reporters worked for you …

Americans are increasingly fooled by the lies of politicians, swayed by extremist politics, and just plain clueless about the basic facts of economics, government, and science. We need to teach the facts so we, the people, can make smart decisions and elect competent leaders.

Jeff Jarvis has a great suggestion, in his commentary on the 15,000 reporters covering each presidential convention:

Figure that those 15k journos spend $300 a night each on a hotel room times five nights, plus $500 for transportation. That’s $2,000. And I’m figuring they’ll be slurping up free meals and drinks. So $2,000 is probably (pardon me) conservative. That’s $30,000,000. Now multiply that times two conventions. That’s $60,000,000.

Why? For what?

Take that $60,000,000 and divide it by a fully loaded labor cost of, say, $100,000 per head and it would pay for 600 reporters for a year. At $50,000 for a hyperlocal reporter, we’d get 1,200 towns covered … What could they do versus what you will do in Tampa and Charlotte transcribing marketing messages and horrid memes?

At least 3,775 newspaper jobs were lost last year; 39,806 since mid-2007; one in three newsroom jobs have been eliminated since 1989.

What you you do of you could assign 600 reporters to cover something important for a year?

(Read the original post here.)

 

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