An oft-quoted industry standard holds that a newspaper ought to have one staffer per 1,000 circulation.

Sorry, that old rule of thumb is folklore, of uncertain origin, and no longer true, if it ever was.

In fact, the most recent Inland Press Association survey, covering 366 dailies, shows an average of a little over 1.2 FTEs in news/editorial for every 1,000 in circulation at papers with 100,000 circulation or more. Economies of scale are a factor, so the average maybe closer to 1.3 FTE at papers in the low 100,000 range and 1.1 FTE for those 350,000-plus. At smaller papers the ratio climbs gradually to about 1.5 FTEs.

The nation's very largest papers are special cases. The New York Times nearly hits the 1 per 1,000 benchmark with a huge staff of 1,100 FTEs for a daily circulation of about 1.2 million. But the Wall Street Journal has just 600 FTEs for a five-day operation with 1.8 million circulation and USA Today, a little over 400, for 2.1 million five-day circulation.

New Inland numbers are due in June and will reflect the staff reductions of 2001 - estimated in a separate survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors as about 2,000 full-time news professionals or about 4 percent. That decline will probably drop FTE index by .3 to .4 but will certainly not drive it down to the level of the fictitious rule of thumb.

If average staffing levels have indeed risen in recent years, there are a number of plausible reasons why. With pagination, jobs and parts of jobs have migrated out of the composing room to the copy desk. Then there is some simple math - industry circulation has fallen about 11 percent from its 1985 peak. The paper isn't getting 11 percent easier to produce - in fact the trend is to more segmentation and offerings to special audiences. Feeding newspaper web sites could be a third factor - though typically most of these staffers are counted as a separate unit off the newsroom budget.

To find out how much and why individual papers vary from these averages requires a little maneuvering around a tradition of corporate confidentiality. Analysts are not pressing for paper-by-paper news staff totals. They are more interested the aggregate trend of personnel costs in a company's newspaper division. Corporate management, among other reasons, may also keep staffing totals to itself to minimize internal squabbles over why paper X got a more generous ration of FTE's than paper Y.

Conversely, there does not seem any particular sanction when individual editors and publishers reveal their numbers as they often do for a flattering profile or in conversation with colleagues. Sometimes, too, going public with an FTE count suits management's purposes. Knight-Ridder CEO, Tony Ridder, for instance, dropped the San Jose Mercury News's FTE numbers last year in a rebuttal suggesting the paper was still well-staffed after the imposition of the cuts that had prompted publisher Jay Harris to quit in protest.

ASNE agreed to make available its paper-by-paper totals for this research on condition that papers not be identified by name. For many years ASNE has done a census to measure and promote newsroom diversity. Given that goal, ASNE counts only full-time jobs and excludes news clerks and library researchers. So the totals are different - and lower by 10 to 25 percent - than an FTE count would be. Nonetheless, the numbers work fine for apples-to-apples comparisons among newspapers or year-to-year. Also ASNE has more participants - about 950 - than Inland and a better representation of large newspapers.

For a snapshot of current staffing practice, we picked a group of five papers considered among the nation's top 30 in a Columbia Journalism Review poll published at the end of 1999 and a group of five journalistically weak papers (as identified by an informal Poynter Institute panel). We also created three additional groups of five papers each. We drew these papers from the ranks of publicly-owned, private chain-owned, and independently-owned newspapers. All the papers were medium-sized with circulation from 120,000 to 350,000.

Here were some of the main results comparing average staff to circulation levels of the five groups:

• The good papers were substantially better-staffed than the weak ones - by about 20 percent. That difference may not be quite as large or uniform as one would guess. In fact it was driven by the two best of the best and worst of the worst in the sample. The other six, good and weak, were fairly similar to each other.

• From a citizen-consumer point of view, it seemed notable that the best-staffed paper we found, with one full-time professional for every 742 readers is putting nearly twice the staff to work per reader as the worst, one for every 1,371.

• The sample of private-chain papers was better staffed on average than the group of publicly-owned papers, but only by about 5 percent. The independent group was about 5 percent better-staffed than the private chain group, 11 percent better than the publicly -owned.

• These comparisons were done using ASNE's news professional totals as of December 31, 2000. We checked against this year's survey, released in April, and the relationships described above still hold true. However, changes at the individual papers sampled were at some variance from the standard story line of the big cutbacks of 2001. Seven of 22 papers for which comparable figures are available actually increased fulltime professional news staff. There was little difference between the good and weak papers (within 1 percent of their 2000 staffing level). In our sample, the publicly-owned papers actually cut less than either the private chains or the independents. The only huge cut in the sample (30 percent) was at a private-chain paper.

• This provides some but hardly overwhelming evidence for the proposition that Wall Street profit pressures have caused public companies to short the news staffs at their papers. Staffing levels varied widely within each group, and the third best ratio among all 25 newspapers sampled was at a publicly-owned paper.

While far short of definitive (a full computer run of all ASNE papers might reveal more), the results of these comparisons invite inquiry into what drives different staffing levels at seemingly similar papers. Is it tight-fisted versus public-spirited management? Or are other factors at play too?

Participants at a Poynter seminar this January on news and business values suggested several reasons a given paper might be granted extra staff. Diane McFarlin, publisher of the Sarasota Herald Tribune and current president of ASNE, said the Tribune has a generous 190 FTEs for 110,000 circulation. In large part, that is to support producing distinctive editions for neighboring counties and to staff a 24-hour local TV news station run from the newsroom. A publishing team from the Palm Beach Post said they compete extensively even within their home county with other dailies. Parent Cox Enterprises has granted the Post extra staff to hold its ground.

Lynn Matthews, McFarlin's boss and president of the New York Times regional newspaper group agreed that multiple editions and a highly competitive situation justify additional news staff. He would put a third factor ahead of those two. "It's a function of markets," Matthews said. "If you have a market that's vibrant and fast-growing - Santa Rosa in our case - it yields more revenues, so it gets more resources across the board. Healthier papers have a thud factor as well - you could fill the space with wire copy, but it makes better sense to have more of a local report even though it's expensive to provide that."

After examining stats for the 25 papers whose staffing ratios we sampled -- and browsing the totals at other papers -- I can report that these three factors hold up with great consistency. The better-staffed papers almost always have one or all three special factors present. And that may be a staffing secret that corporate management prefers not to share with competitors and hometown constituents - its judgment of which communities are hot and which are not.

Staffing is certainly not the only index of a newspaper's news capacity. A slightly different take is to measure news and editorial expenditures as a percentage of operating revenue. This picks up several dimensions an FTE staff count alone does not - salaries (and by implication the experience and skill of the staff) along with the budget for such items as travel, training, and wire services. "The old rule of thumb is 10 percent," said Paul Tash, editor and president of the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the Poynter Institute. "We're well above that but my impression is that most of the industry isn't anymore."

The 2000 Inland survey shows papers above 179,500 circulation spending an average of roughly 9.5 percent of revenues for news editorial. For papers of smaller circulation (50,000 to 179,500) the average appears closer to 11.5 percent.

The St. Pete Times with 337,000 circulation spends 12.5 percent of revenues on news and editorial. That numbers carries a provocative implication. If an average paper would leave two or three percentage points of profit margin on the table and apply that skillfully to journalistic depth and quality, that paper would compare favorably in news resources to the Times. And perhaps could grow its circulation, too, as the Times and other highly regarded, well-staffed regionals like The News and Observer of Raleigh and Oregonian of Portland have done in recent years.

On the other hand, since the average is 9.5 percent of revenue for the newsroom, there are doubtless papers spending only 7 percent. Those are the communities where readers have reason to complain that there is hardly any news in the newspaper any more.

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Rick Edmonds is researcher and writer working on a series of reports on the business aspects of journalism for Poynter. He is a former reporter and editor who has worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Petersburg Times.