Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

Michael Massing of the Columbia Journalism Review digs up some startling info that helps explain why network TV news is knee-deep in FAIL while National Public Radio thrives:

Katie Couric's annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric's salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news. (link)

It also captures a hard reality that news folk should keep in mind as they protest the collapse of their industry: most money in journalism, isn't spent on journalism.



Thanks, Cyrus