Behind the Scenes: Why our newspaper isn’t free

See? We want the words, but we don’t want to pay for them. There are a few ways to illustrate why we charge for our work, but maybe the easiest is simply to show you what it takes to write one story.

In the May 15 edition of Columbia Gorge News, we had 70 local stories or elements (I count letters to the editor as one, for example). I wrote one of those stories, about student teachers from Mexico coming to Trout Lake for an exchange program. It’s 1,224 words.

For starters, I received two press releases leading up to the two-week exchange. To get those ready for press, I edit to AP style (Associated Press, or how we format our stories so they appear uniformly throughout our publication), then paste the finished release into InCopy (our pagination program). Photos are saved separately. And both were eventually loaded online and scheduled for social media. Let’s say that took 30 minutes total for both releases.

Next came my trip to Trout Lake School to meet with administrators, teachers and the student teachers involved in the exchange. The interview took an hour. However, I live in Odell, so my travel time was at least an hour and a half.

I took notes during the interview as well as recorded it — the notes being my backup in case something happened to said recording. We use Otter.ai, a service that turns audio into a transcript. It took another half hour for the transcript to be ready for viewing.

Otter.ai is good. But it is not perfect. I always go through the entire transcript and mark any sections Otter.ai has clearly mangled. I go back through the recording and manually transcribe those sketchy areas. We’ll be conservative and say that took another half hour.

Hey, we’re up to four hours now, and it’s finally time to write! The first thing I do is gather all the information I’ve acquired — those press releases, the audio transcript, my scribbled notes and various emails. I read through everything to get a firm understanding of the story, and add at least another 15 minutes to my total.

I never get a perfect story in one go. For this story, it took me a good three hours to come up with a rough draft. Next comes editing — does it make sense? What does this word in that quote mean? Should I move this entire paragraph up or down? Wait, there was definitely another quote that really needs to be inserted. Oh rats, this part needs to come out. Oh double rats, this part needs to be rewritten.

Pro tip: Never marry anything you write. Everything is expendable.

Editing can take longer than writing— it’s one thing to crank out a draft; it’s quite another to make it readable. For the sake of this exercise, though, we’ll say revisions took another two hours.

As with press releases, once a story is written, it takes about 15 minutes to load into InCopy and format so it’s ready for our designer (the one who makes the newspaper look like a newspaper) to pull onto the page (cutlines written, headline in this font, byline and byline title in that font, etc.). I also give it one last read because there’s nothing like publishing something to find all your errors.

Story written, I turn my attention to photos. Uploading takes about a half hour (because I take a LOT; I’m a writer, not a photographer. Thank heavens for digital cameras), and choosing and editing photos takes at least another half hour. Next comes filing the photos that will accompany the story to a shared folder all staff has access to — that takes minutes, so I’m not going to add that to the count.

P.S. Journalists are not allowed to add or remove anything from a photo, but we can brighten and tighten it up so it looks good in print.

We’re now at 10 and a half hours. For one story. That’s just my time. With 70 stories and elements in the May 15 edition, let’s just estimate half were bylines (meaning written by a staff member) — that’s about 367 hours total. We’ll assume the rest were submitted content that takes 15 minutes to go through the entire process — there’s another 140 hours.

All of those hours equals a wage to employees. Using $15/hour as an example, that’s $7,605 in stories alone for that edition.

I’m not including the composer’s time to get stories onto the page, or staff time to proof the finished copy on deadline (eight hours times five of us). I’m not including printing costs (which run thousands of dollars a month), costs for the truck and driver to get the printed paper in Salem to us in Hood River, staff time to deliver the newspapers to area post offices and newsstands, or postage. I’m not including reimbursable mileage or bridge tolls.

A subscription to our print newspaper, which includes unlimited online access, is roughly 86 cents a week, or $3.75 a month — $45 for a year.

That’s why we have a paywall. That’s why we rely on advertising dollars. That’s why subscriptions are so important.

Because it takes time and money to bring you all of that local news — which would be true even if our staff didn’t need to eat.