Could the L.A. Times go online-only?

Alan Mutter of Newsosaur crunches the numbers and explains why print newspapers can’t go online-only without major hits to quality journalism and the companies’ bottom lines.

To prove his point, Mutter analyzes the financials of the Los Angeles Times (owned by Sam Zell’s Tribune Co.), to determine whether it could cover the salaries of its journalists by becoming an online-only operation.

After estimating that the newspaper pulls in annual earnings of $72 million, Mutter concludes:

If the L.A. Times stopped publishing the print newspaper, 90% of its ad revenues would go away and something like $65 million of its cash flow would disappear. You can see how that would play havoc, to say the least, with Tribune’s ability to recover from bankruptcy.

Mutter then describes the kind of hit the newsroom would have to take for the newspaper to be profitable it as a Web-only venture:

The only way a publisher could generate a profit on this operation would be by – you guessed it – cutting the newsroom. To pull a 20% profit out of an all-digital L.A. Times, the editorial staff would have to cut by roughly 48%.

The comments below Mutter’s post argue over the meaning of his calculations, and whether journalism would truly suffer. But one response in particular stood out, making the point that online publications are popular largely because of their print counterparts:

Without the print edition to drive it, what happens to website traffic? It is very difficult to maintain top-of-mind awareness as an online-only entity. The irony is that a paper such as the LA Times would end up resorting to buying “old media” — billboards, TV ads — to keep their brand in the public eye.