Buddy Larsen followed with:

Katy Couric's total package would pay 50 correspondents $400,000 each. So, CBS could actually field 200 very professional 100K/yr correspondents, and just let the execs--or mail room staff--take turns spending a few minutes reading the teleprompter into a camera, come 6PM.

Your business blogger had this to add to the conversation:

Wretchard, you touch upon several important points here. More language capability would certainly be helpful. And yes the salary multiples are extraordinarily high in this star-driven media industry that we have now. Most important, I think, is your conjecture that the MSM may not be appropriately structured to cover a story like this correctly.

As I see it the incorrect "structures" are two kinds: organizational and cognitive. These are distinct but very much related.

Regardless of how the formal structure got the way it is, a firm's existing physical, financial, human, and organizational resources can always be reconfigured to meet new challenges. New resources can be acquired and new capabilities developed. At least in theory.

As everyone here likely knows from experience, organizational restructuring often fails because of the difficulty attendant to redesigning the structure of managers' and workers' cognitions, particularly the ones about the firm and its place in its industry and in the broader world.

If you want a glimpse into just how difficult this would be in the mainstream media of today, take a look at Molly Ivin's insufferably arrogant and remarkably naive analysis of why major news papers and mainstream media organizations are in such dire straits. Here are a few choice excerpts.

Molly Ivins on Bloggers:

We are in trouble. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, run by Columbia University, has a new report out that finds the number of media outlets continues to grow, but both the number of stories covered and the depth of reporting are sliding backward. Television, radio and newspapers are all cutting staff, while the bloggers of the Internet either do not have the size or the interest to go out and gather news. Bloggers are not news-gatherers, but opinion-mongers. I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter -- nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened. Or, as author-journalist Curtis Wilkie puts it, "Unless you can cover a five-car pile-up on Route 128, you shouldn't be allowed to cover a presidential campaign."

Molly on the future of the MSM:

"I've thought for years that newspapers should all be owned by nonprofits. There is a chance something like this will actually happen -- the Newspaper Guild, in alliance with the Communications Workers of America, is getting ready to bid on the 12 (Knight Ridder) papers McClatchy has to sell. Eight of the 12 are Guild papers, with combined employment of 7,000 and circulation of 1.3 million. Among the 12 are such outstanding newspapers as The Philadelphia Inquirer, San Jose Mercury News and St. Paul Pioneer Press. McClatchy can't swallow all of them, and so the two unions have turned to a "worker-friendly" investment fund to back their bid. Keep an eye on this: It is a most hopeful development."

The News Guild, you may recall, is lead by Linda Foley, someone who last year claimed that the US military was intentionally targeting journalists in Iraq and who is an avowed advocate of agenda journalism.

If this is the mindset of even a small number of the MSM's leading lights, expect things to get much worse before they get any better.

Tags: molly ivins | msm | Media | Journalism | Blogging | belmont club |