News Librarian Affected by Economy

An article in Editor & Publisher,a journal that focuses on the newspaper industry, detailed the closing of the library at the Wall Street Journal. As of March 23, 2009, the library and two librarian positions will cease to exist at the WSJ. Reporters will be doing their own research using digital databases that will be available to them. Leslie A. Norman, the librarian who has been running the library since 2007, predicts that it will cost more for the reporters to do their own research than it would for the library and two librarian positions to continue as they are now.
Norman also said that the reporters will probably be using a Lexis product to do their own research. Knowing what I know of LexisNexis for law schools, each click of the mouse can be very costly and not knowing what you are doing or knowing tricks that librarians pick up on can be very costly. While I don't know if the "Due Diligence Dashboard" works in the same way that a LexisNexis works for law, I do know that first year law students are purposely scared by librarians who tell them stories of law interns who can rack up a bill of $2500 in less than ten minutes.
This is an area where I think libraries and definitely librarians are underappreciated, undervalued, and horribly misunderstood. The asset that a librarian is to a company in the corporate sector is often overlooked and the way that a librarian in fact saves the company time and money is not fully realized. I predict that the WSJ will be rehiring the librarians, especially when they realize how much time they saved the reporters. Otherwise, the WSJ could be seeing a decline in the quality of their reporting.