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151 Capacity Measures Measuring quality in journalism is a little bit like measuring love. Once at a meeting of professors who specialize in media ethics , I expressed the view (borrowed from science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein) that if a phenomenon exists, it has to exist in some quantity. And if there is a quantity, there ought to be a way to measure it. My colleagues, most of whom had formal training in philosophy , were aghast. “You can’t measure love,” one of them said. “And we know that love exists.” Well, call me conceited, but I think I can measure love. It’s interesting , it affects human behavior, and that behavior can be visible enough to measure. True, it wouldn’t be a direct measure. But in social science, we often are quite content with indirect measurement . Arriving at such a measure is called operationalization. We could talk forever about the true definition of love, but our operational definition would deal with some aspect of love that surfaces enough in the visible world to create a measurable effect. The Gospel According to St. John, for example, treats love as a continuous variable and offers an operational measure for the end point on the continuum: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”1 Journalistic quality also has its visible manifestations. So far, we have dealt mostly with content measures, e.g. the ratio of news to 1. John 15:13, King James Version. Chapter 9 152 The Vanishing Newspaper advertising or the accuracy of the staff-written stories. But we can also measure the consequences of that content by going directly to the audience through survey research and finding out how much they read, trust, and respect a published product. As before, we shall use the newspaper, a medium for which a long history is available, as a test case. And so this chapter is about yet a third way to operationalize quality: as the capacity of the newspaper. Think about the newspapering process in the good years, before things started to fall apart. Think of the successful newspaper as a black box. Capacity is what was put into the box. Content is what was created inside the box. Consequence is what came out of the box. I like to think of it as the 3-C model: capacity, content, and consequence. It could apply to any medium. The leadership role in measuring newspaper capacity was assumed by the Poynter Institute when it hired Rick Edmonds, a free-lance investigator and analyst, to look for operational measures of journalism capacity. He found some excellent sources: the summary reports of the Inland Daily Press Association and the staffing surveys of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Capacity was a topic dear to the hearts of newspaper editors because it defined their constraints, the tools they were given by their publishers to create the best output their talent and ingenuity could produce. For this reason, it was also an emotional topic. Both editors and publishers were reluctant to release the intimate details of their businesses, and so the data that Edmonds had to work with were encumbered by the need for secrecy. Where capacity involved a particular job function, however, it was easier to measure. The presence of an ombudsman, for example, indicated a highly specific kind of capacity, a reader advocate who was responsible for the newspaper ’s public self-criticism. A similarly specific kind of capacity was found in training. A newspaper with a full-time person responsible for staff training had a different kind of capacity than one that did not. For a look at the grossest measure of capacity, ratio of staff size to circulation , my graduate research assistant Minjeong Kim (now Dr. Kim) and I took a cue from Edmonds and used data collected by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Most of the data used in this book are publicly archived and available. The ASNE data is not public because it is collected with a qualified promise of confidentiality as part of its long-range program for increasing the amount of minority representation on newspaper staffs. Minority representation on the newspaper, as compared to minority representation in the community, could itself be taken as an indicator of quality. But for now, we’ll just look at the raw figures. To start, we need a benchmark. According to newspaper folklore, a good newspaper employed about one news...

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