The following extract is taken from an editor’s introduction to consultation on the future direction of a regional newspaper.

So what could a new Birmingham Post look like, one to weather the recession and emerge equipped to thrive in the new media world? The facts: our biggest expenses are staff and manufacturing costs. Any change that doesn’t reduce either or both of these areas simply won’t plug the profit gap, so our approach is to look at reducing the overall number of pages printed per week. With each page lost, you reduce the absolute cost of the ink and paper – and also the work that goes into producing the content, and hence the labour cost. We’ve therefore looked at reducing the size of the paper on an average day, or reducing the number of days on which we publish.

We’re now left with two options, each of which result in broadly the same improvement of the profit position, but are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

In the first option, the daily pagination of the Post would be reduced to just 40 or 48 pages per day, including Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, when we currently exceed 60 pages. Because of the need for savings, many of those pages will need to rely more on contributed content and national stories from agencies than is currently the case, and the local flavour will be diluted.

The second option is to move to a weekly model – probably publishing on Thursdays – with a much bigger edition of around 96 pages at its core, plus commercial supplements and sections such as Post Property and Living magazine.

Questions

1 What other costs will be reduced alongside the reduction in labour costs?
2 How will the company achieve the same profit improvement from two different proposals?