The Roanoke Times used to live here, but it no longer does.

The Shrinking, Shrinking, Shrinking Newsrooms

It was interesting to chat with some people in the Roanoke-area journalism know last night at the Kendig Awards after-party. I discovered that Lee Enterprises, owner of The Roanoke Times and other papers across Virginia, considers these former independent entities "bureaus" now.

That's why, said one newsie, that Danville has one reporter in the newsroom. Danville has a population of 39,000 (losing people for the past few years) and the Bee has a circulation of about 15,000. The news division at The Times has (according to its website) 14 newsroom employees, four in sports and one in features (with the loss of Mike Allen to the editorial page, where he is alone).

The Times has daily "readership" (nowhere can I find "circulation") of 33,000 and Sunday "readership" of 54,000. When I worked at The Times in the 1970s, circulation on Sunday was 125,000. We had bureaus in Wytheville and Lexington, and we had four editions a day, the earliest (for the coalfields) with a 9 p.m. deadline, same as the single paper The Times produces daily now.

"Readership" is a fancy inflation of "circulation" that can't be proved. In most cases I've seen, it generally is triple the circulation number because of "pass-along," meaning more than one reader per paper. Most publications prefer you to know their readership and not their circulation. (Online readership can add considerably to the print version.)

You will notice that in the daily reporting on The Times' pages, there are dispatches from Fredericksburg, Richmond, Danville, Charlottesville, Bristol, Lynchburg and other Lee-owned properties, which I assume are now "bureaus" for The Times. That makes for better local coverage in those areas, but Roanokers, in my experience, want coverage of Roanoke first.

'Course that would meaning hiring more people and doing something to keep them working, which doesn't seem to be a priority these days.