What Happens to a Content Business When You Fire All the Content Creators?

[Commentary] Three days ago, The Newark Star Ledger, the largest paper in New Jersey won an astonishing 4 Emmy Awards for their online video. Astonishing because the Emmy is a television award and the Ledger is a newspaper. It brings to 14 the total number of Emmy Awards that the reporting staff of the Ledger has won -- and 58 nominations.

So it was a bit of a shock to read that Advance Publications, the Ledger's parent company, is going to cut 167 jobs at the paper, 40 of them in the newsroom. What the Internet has done is explode the number of platforms for information and cut the cost of dissemination to nothing. Now, on Facebook (which is apparently the primary news source for many under-30 year olds) you can instantly reach 1.2 billion people worldwide for free. Today, anyone can own a press. But what are you going to put into it? Where is the content going to come from? For the most part, it comes from the kind of people who work at places like The Star Ledger. If you want to get beyond cats in trees or photos of your dinner last night; if you want intelligent content, then you have to pay attention to the content creators. The more platforms we have -- iPhones, tablets, social media, apps, blah blah.. the more they need to be fed with content. And where is that content going to come from? The Star Ledger has great reporters, great journalists. They should be the LAST people who get fired. They should be making content for the almost unlimited demand of a million new platforms.

[Rosenblum is Video producer, Founder of Current TV]