Cut top talent, and what do you get?

The New York Times' David Carr writes a wonderful column about the recent trend of newspapers cutting their top (and highest paid) talent to save the money they'd otherwise have to pay their oldest and most experienced writers.

He writes:

Yes, the revenue picture is grim and growing grimmer. The biggest outlay besides putting the printed artifact on the street is salaries. And journalists tend to get a lot more indignant when the sheet cake and goodbye speeches are being served up on behalf of people who have the same job as they have.

But there is a business argument to be made here. Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.

In my local market, the Burlington Free Press let go one of its columnists, Ed Shamy, who wrote funny, sarcastic and always enjoyable columns about life in Vermont. If the paper explained why they picked him to cut, I missed it. But the end result is the newspaper is less interesting to read, has less relevance for local readers, and has lost a strong voice that helped define what it means to live here.

Apparently we live in the healthiest city in the United States.

Two things: 1) It's based on people's self-reported evaluation of their health, with 92 percent of Burlingtonians (is that the right word? Burlingtoniads?) saying they are in good or great health. Self-reported data is notoriously unreliable. And 2) "vegan options are plentiful." Ehhh - not so fast.

As a one-time vegan and full-time vegetarian, I was suprised there weren't more vegan options in Burlington, given the large college population and its leftist leanings. There weren't any vegetarian restaurants in Burlington until September, when the New Ethic restaurant (which I recommend) opened in the Old North End.

Enough about Burlington's health. How about the health of its daily newspaper, the Burlington Free Press?

Gannett announced more layoffs earlier this month. The paper had already cut six staffers (although not all in the newsroom) in August.

The Burlington Free Press is just one of the many victims of the collapse of the newspaper industry. Yet residents of Burlington should be very concerned: it's the only daily paper in the town. If the paper cuts back on its coverage -- and, worst case scenario, even shuts down in a few years as ad dollars continue to dwindle -- it's going to leave this town poorer in many ways.

This came to mind listening to government officials talking about bailing out the auto industry: You can still buy cars from other manufacturers even if the US automakers collapse. But if your town's daily newspaper goes belly up -- well, you can't look to Japan to supply news for your town.

So how about a bail-out for the ailing newspaper industry? It would prop up an industry that employs 54,000 reporters, editors and writers (down from a peak of almost 57,000 in 1990) and pulls in advertising sales of $42 billion a year.

Aside from the economic impact, think of the civic benefit. If newspapers shut down, who will write that investigative piece into a local drug problem, or uncover wrong-doing by a local politician?