Newspaper editors say staff cutbacks have degraded the quality of the product

The quality of newspapers has been damaged by staff cutbacks, according to a survey of editors conducted by the Associated Press Managing Editors association.

Check out this question and the responses:

Please describe how reductions in staffing have affected the quality of your journalism (check one):


a. We have not reduced payroll — 8.8%

b. We’ve made some cuts but it’s had little or no effect on quality — 19.9%

c. Somewhat affected, but I don’t lose sleep over it — 41.1%

d. Greatly affected — 30.2%

Not surprising. And look at some of the comments from editors:

• "Our newsroom staff has been cut by 50 percent. One person is doing the job that two people did just a year ago at our weekly paper. Each week's paper may be smaller due to ad sales being down, but the news doesn't stop. There's just no way one person can cover an entire county effectively, no matter how small."
  

• "We can't cover even half of what we need to, and we are unable to devote the time and resources to enterprise and investigations."
  

• "We've cut the number of reporters, which inevitably hurts the product. But we've worked hard to not let readers know that we have fewer people, although that means everyone in house is working really, really hard."
  

• "Everyone's doing more, and we're starting to see the effect of burnout. We're finding it difficult to do everything we'd like to do to best serve our readers in print and online."
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