Is it possible to have too much of a good thing?

"Do we have an excess of daily press journalists? And, if so, how does the surfeit vary from country to country?"

Frédéric Filloux is a French journalist, academic and editor of a newsletter about business models of media and technology (full disclosure: Monsieur Filloux has in the past spoken at conferences held by WAN, which also owns EditorsWeblog). In a report released earlier this week on MondayNote.com, Filloux has performed statistical analysis of data contained in the recent OECD report, "The Evolution of News and the Internet". In his analysis, he looks at the relationship between the number of active journalists in a given country and the gross circulation of newspapers in that country during the same time period.

Filloux infers that the OECD demonstrates at least four significant trends. The first trend is that, even in situations where the addition of journalists to a country hasn't mitigated reader depletion, a higher number of journalists will correlate to greater industry stability. He notes that Japan reflects an anomaly in regards to this trend, but this can be attributed to Japan's uniquely successful dailies (which represent the highest circulation figures in the world).

Filloux's second observation is that "Productivity depends on market density and concentration." This is illustrated with a comparison of stats between Japan, Sweeden/Findland & USA.

To produce a million copies per day, it takes...

414 journalists in Japan, a record high dense market in which the average daily sells almost 500,000 copies...

but 1600 in Sweden and Finland where a daily sells typically 40,000 copies...

and 1122 in the US where, on average, a daily sells 34,000 copies

The third trend is that European newspaper industries with "decent" profitability have demonstrated a greater flexibility in terms of workforce adjustments.

The last finding is that an overabundance of government subsidies correlates to low operating profit, inflexible workforce adjustments and decreasing readership.

For a complete explanation of the findings and graphical support, please visit Frédéric Filloux's website, Monday Note.