Your staff is how big?

I posted this to my new blog, but thought it was worth cross posting since, well, it's about The News Record.

I’ve been on a blog kick since I started this thing. Mostly I’ve been interested in reading blogs by other journalists — student or professional — to see how things are going in their world.

In the past two days, I’ve come across two different blogs by two different student editors at two different universitys and read that they have staffs that are in the 150-175 range. What the heck kind of newsroom is that?

The News Record has a staff of 11 editors — myself (EIC and opinion), the managing editor, two news, two sports, entertainment, college living/spotlight, online, multimedia and photo. We also have one chief photographer and four designers on payroll. There are five people in the business department. As far as bi-weekly paychecks go, that’s it.

We have stringers who can be paid if they reach the minimum number of published stories/photos (10 per quarter), but even then there are, between reporters and photographers, we have, maybe 40 stringers who do work on a regular basis. What’s even more surprising is that we’ve had more people interested in working with us this year than ever before, at least in my memory.

How in the heck do you convince 150 people to be interested? It’s like pulling teeth to get students to come into the newsroom with a genuine interest in working and sticking around. You would think that the students in the University of Cincinnati’s journalism program would at least want to be involved, but even still, I don’t know anyone in program who doesn’t or hasn’t worked for The News Record.

Not only how do you convince that many people to give a damn, but how do you afford a staff that huge? Am I missing something?

I’m not complaining (except that I kind of am), I’m just mostly astonished. I can’t even imagine what TNR would be like if that many people were reporting or shooting or doing video work. We do a damn good job with what we have, but with 150 people we might be able to take over the world.

I’ll have to share this thought with editor-in-chief-elect Gin A. Ando. Maybe he’ll have better luck recruiting than I did. UC journalism students, if you happen to be reading this, if you’re not working with The News Record, what are you doing?