redblueamerica.com

Simon was being honest, revealing the liberal old media's biases -- without realizing the irony of how the reasons for his laments are the reasons for the decline.

I can vouch for Ben's "Riverside, world. World, Riverside" story. I was with him at a Starbucks (yes, they even have them in the "boonies") when we looked to our right and saw the ad campaign on the side of a lonely, untouched newspaper box.

Unlike, Ben, I'm a little sad for the demise of newspapers. We'll probably always still get the paper tossed on our driveway because (1) it's so cheap and (2) my wife is a voracious newspaper reader. She runs through every section when she has the time, which means every Saturday, Sunday and Holiday with very few exceptions.

And I do use it for more than just a convenient pastime while on the throne. I do love my "Get Fuzzy," and the Times' coverage of movies and the buzz of Hollywood is very good. And, on occasion, their coverage of the art scene in the LA Basin is interesting.

But news? Forget it. I read the headlines. The wife reads the stories, tells me how biased it is, calls out a few examples, and then its time for another refill of the coffee.

That's not so much a "Washington Post" piece as it is a "David Simon" piece -- he, of course, is creator of "The Wire," has a famously dyspeptic view of both journalism and, well, life, and should not be taken as representative of anything but David Simon's view.

That is all.

Skeptic, good points. Readers are creatures of habit, that's true. The problem for newspapers is, their traditional readers are dying and the readers they need are drifting from print. The only time I read the paper edition of the Times is when I visit my parents' house. Otherwise, I read it -- some of it -- online.

The Times has also become slow and sloppy with its coverage. That monopoly mentality at work, I suppose. About a year ago, the Times ran a rather insulting ad campaign in Riverside along the lines of "Riverside, here's the world... the world, here's Riverside." As if those slack-jawed yokels were too benighted to know what was going on beyond the city limits. But I lost count of all the occasions that the Times ran a story days or even weeks after The Press-Enterprise had it.

It's very funny to see liberal journalists who advocate change turn so conservative when markets turn against them that they lose their jobs.

While most newspaper people consider the Times a great newspaper, I've always looked at it as a writers' paper, not a product produced for consumers.

Historically, the Times has featured long, ponderous, and to many of its readers, irrelevant stories.

That luxury was affordable for the Times as long as it had a regional monopoly and readers and advertisers had no alternatives.

Now readers and advertisers rule, thanks to the Internet, eBay, craigslist.com, monster.com and thousands of blogs, message boards and news sites. Even more troubling for newspapers is that young people apparently are reading less, especially when it comes to newspapers.

The question, of course, is how will the Times cut its editorial and other budgets and keep the readers and advertisers it still has?

Readers are creatures of habit. They don't like radical changes in their papers, magazines or even their favorite web sites. If readers begin to feel cheated, they'll drop their newspaper subscriptions and go elsewhere.

This will leave advertisers no choice but to seek alternatives to newspapers.

It's a tough problem that no one in the business seems to have solved. At this point, it appears that the newspapers' markets are shrinking. They'll settle out when a new balance between the print readers and online readers is struck.

What percentage of readers will prefer print, and what percent online and what percent a combination of the two?

We still don't know.