instant history

Steve Lovelady, CJR Daily managing editor and Bryan Keefer, CJR Daily assistant managing editor, have resigned after their budget was slashed in half. In the New York Times article on the resignations, Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School, says that cuts were necessary in order to boost print subscriptions:

Mr. Lemann said he was faced with the same quandary confronting most news organizations today — how to finance an online staff while the Web site is free to readers. ... He said he had been “out fundraising every day” but had not scraped together enough to finance the Web site at full strength.

As a result, he said, he has decided that a concerted campaign to gain subscribers for the print magazine, while expensive, will result in more income, which will help maintain an online staff that he said would still be bigger than those of most other magazines.

I have previously written on Bryan Keefer and what he thought was a "Messy Time' for Media".

In the article, Lemann says he plans to roll CJR Daily into the Columbia Journalism Review's main site and boost overall revenue with the sale of advertising and archival material.