How thin can a newspaper staff be? MediaNews is looking for an editor who may find out. Clyde Davis, who blogs about free newspapers, points to a job posting for Flash, a "daily commuter tabloid" planned for Salt Lake. The editor will supervise a staff of four.
I have some experience doing this, having edited a short-lived afternoon newspaper called the St. Louis Evening News in the mid-1980s. Even relying heavily on the resources of the morning Globe-Democrat, it required about a dozen people.
However, we were operating a full-scale broadsheet with a press run of 80,000, working with relatively primitive technology (pre-pagination), and actually editing the copy, a practice that newspapers seem to be abandoning these days.
We flirted with a free model during the final year of the Globe's existence, starting a free Sunday paper that primarily succeeded in sucking all the ads out of our morning daily. I wonder sometimes how that might have played out differently with a competent publisher with deeper pockets.
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They do own a daily in Salt Lake...
... so I would assume the staff of four would be something like one writer, one copy editor / page designer, one photographer, maybe. The rest of the content would come from the Tribune newsroom, no?
Having never been to Salt Lake City, it does have me scratching my head - are they trying to get the paper in the hands of people who ride the bus? Do they have any traffic there?