You're forgetting the actual paper and the cost of distributing it.
We know the revenues (roughly) and that the expenses are about the same. How many actual investigative reporters do you think that the NYT has? Multiply that number by your guess of their average burdended cost and compare that to the total expenses.
My guess is that the NYT has at most 30 investigative reporters and they cost, on average, $200k/year. That's $6M. If there are actually 100, that's $20M.
BTW 30 is absurdly low. The NYT has more than 30 offices!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_empl...
Full Time Employees: 10,231
The question isn't "writers" but all of the employees involved in actual news creation. I have no idea what it might actually be, but a 1:10 ratio between "operatives" and "support staff" is my guess.
Anyway, some figures, taken from the New York Times Annual Report and 10-K filing for 2007: http://www.nytco.com/investors/financials/annual_reports.htm...
From the business.pdf ( http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2007/business.pdf ) the overall number of employees are 10,231 (4,408 work for the New York Times Media Group---the rest for other newspapers across the country). I estimated the number of reporters at 650 (From here ( http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a... ) people we find that people listed in italics are reporters for the New York Times and not wanting to count across 26 other pages, just counted the number of reporters here, which was 25, and multiplied that by 26 to get my estimate. Crude, but should get us into the right ball park). For just the New York Times that's about 15% of all employees are reporters. So, let's run with that figure.
Out of 10,231 employees (at all the newspapers run by this company), that means they have around 1,500 reporters. From the financial statements ( http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2007/fin-stmts.pdf ) we can see that their total expenses are $2,928,070,000. Assuming an average of $200k per reporter (given elsewhere in this thread) that works out to be 10% of expenses (whereas total eages are around 22%). Obviously, an average salary of $100k (remember, these are reporters for various papers around the country) this makes reporter expense 5% of all expenditures.
2% is low, but not by much I would think.
I'd like to see a citation on that "2%". I don't believe it.
What will we miss? Obviously, the basic reportage function of newspapers is what we'll miss--the boring research, interviewing, verifying, and so on. This is something that bloggers cannot reproduce without a news infrastructure and being on salary.