The Washington Post and Baltimore Sun are dealing with their smaller newsrooms by pooling resources and sharing coverage. This is significant, because they are using their respective staffs to do the actual news gathering and reporting, not just aggregation. It's part of an increasingly popular trend:
In the last few months, papers around the country have struck several content-sharing agreements of varying degrees, including The Miami Herald, The Palm Beach Post and The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale; The Dallas Morning News and Star-Telegram of Fort Worth; and a group of eight major papers in Ohio.
“This is something that, as recently as two years ago, you really wouldn’t have seen papers doing at all,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists that owns the St. Petersburg Times. “In the current climate where there’s such urgency to get savings to keep pace with the falling ad revenue, I think this is snowballing from one place to another.”
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2008.