Newspaper content budgets – what would you cut?

It is Saturday, cold outside and I’m doing laundry so I thought it would be interesting to do some analysis of the online survey Jeff Jarvis posted using Google apps.

First, I need to make some assumptions about the respondents. I’m guessing that the audience is going to skew towards folks involved in journalism as a business since they would be the most likely audience for Jarvis’s blog. Can I assume that they also would have some control or involvement in the content buying process? Not sure about that, but I would guess that some of them probably play that role.

When I downloaded the data on Feb. 16, there were 425 responses to the survey. Visitors were asked, “If you had to reduce a newspaper’s budget, what would you cut?”There is a checklist of 20 different items (see the survey here). Visitors could select multiple items.

Here’s a quick view – the clear loser is financial tables and the sports section.

Financial tables 43.06%
Sports section 21.65%
Sports columnists 8.00%
Entertainment section 3.76%
Movie critic 3.76%
Business section 2.59%
Syndicated features 2.59%
TV critic 2.59%
Music critic 1.88%
Book critic 1.65%
Comics 1.65%
Foreign bureaus 1.65%
Lilfestyle section 1.41%
Washington bureau 1.18%
Editorial columnists 0.71%
Copy editors 0.47%
Online site 0.47%
Top editors 0.47%
Editorial page 0.24%
Photographers 0.24%