Some interesting stuff in today’s blogosphere

In our national policy debates on education, health care, public safety and a variety of other goods deemed to be in the public interest, it’s widely accepted that there are minimum provider ratios (providers per 1,000 people) that must be honored to preserve a decent product or service.  We have designated “shortage areas” where federal incentives are offered to doctors willing to practice there. We have best practices for the teacher-student ratio in classrooms.

Should we be concerned about the falling ratio of professional journalists to citizens in a community?

There’s an interesting blog post about how the latest wave of cutbacks at newspapers violates a longstanding norm: “The unwritten but widely honored rule of thumb in the industry always has been that a newspaper should employ one journalist for every 1,000 in daily circulation,” writes media analyst Alan Mutter in a post today. 

In response to the layoffs and fiscal problems besetting the newspaper industry, there’s a web site, TreeHouse Media Project, that’s gotten buzz for its promise of helping journalists become their own publishers. The headline is catchy, but it misses the mark. Google is here to stay, and we’re better off if we use it to help our fortunes rather than try to stop it.

I was stunned by the statistic on the TreeHouse Media home page:

“One in four newspaper jobs have disappeared since 1990 — more than 10,000 in 2007 alone.”

Anyone know where that statistic comes from?