Patrick Beeson

Financial analysts are calling for a consecutive year of red ink for the newspaper industry in 2008.

This makes hiring Flash developers, Web designers and programmers a tough prospect when many papers can barely maintain their core staff.

So what's a newspaper to do when the demand for these folks is at a "furious" level?

Journerdism's Will Sullivan keenly notes many newspapers are trying to solve this problem by hiring freelancers for specific projects:

...perhaps this new model of high tech freelancers filling the gaps could help catapult papers’ online storytelling into the new age, while balancing stock holders demands for high profit (as uncool as that may be to say or rationalize).

The Entrepreneurial Fund group at Scripps has made use of several development agencies to build out innovative concepts. Most of these sites also use open-source applications such as Drupal to further cut costs.

But the use of freelance talent has a downside: How do you support or extend the applications built by folks outside your organization in the long term?

Scripps corporate and other headquarters for media companies are answering this question by forming a world-class team of talent to develop applications and services on an enterprise level.

This helps lessen the pain at our smaller papers, who don't have the budget to hire a Holovaty.

We're also fortunate to have some really great folks at the site level to put these applications into action. In fact, some of the developers now working in Knoxville came from individual sites such as TC Palm and Naples News.

Having been part of an online team at the site level (The Roanoke Times/roanoke.com), I can say from experience that trying to build and maintain a Web team to cover all aspects of the business (IT, programmers, marketing, producers, designers, analytics, etc) is an expensive and often-unwieldy task.

Quality of staff can become less of a priority because the top candidates demand higher paychecks than newspapers can afford. Again, this plagues smaller papers than their larger circulation cousins, who have the financial muscle to attract those top-tier candidates.

At least until Silicon Valley comes calling.

And for those industry veterans that proclaim Web jockeys with a taste for journalism should start out low on the totem (both in status and pay), I say take the buy-outs you're no doubt being offered.

Folks with the online steez demanded by an industry -- one who is betting it's longterm strategy on -- should be able to demand both high pay, and responsibility.