Papers sail the treacherous seas

I've been so busy with my jaw-dropped open reading Daniel Ellsberg's memoirs of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers that I haven't really been putting much time here. Almost every page of "Secrets" is like peering deeper and deeper into the mechanisms of government. What strikes me most is the mendacity that goes beyond what I even imagined possible -- and I'm already well acquainted with the terrain. For now, I can say, take every statement about Iraq for a lie. Just flip them backwards, pretending as though we were in Alice in Wonderland.
What I wanted to put up here, though, was Editor & Publisher's Top 25 newspapers in terms of circulation. Notice the drop compared to last year. I guess all those layoffs really helped. I'd like to chart the drop in readership with the drop in editorial staff. Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor will cease printing daily. Instead, the paper will switch to online for its daily news and publish a weekly news magazine. The Web site boasts that the CSM is the first national daily to go totally online. Finally. Newspapers in recent years have had some of the very worst managers of any industry. They mishandled the Internet "revolution" like the three stooges and they just keep bumbling around making the same mistakes, thinking that THIS fix is the ONE. But managers keep reaching for the same old tools -- first and foremost editorial layoffs and maniacal drives to push up ad revenue instead of focusing on news quality. Maybe it's not too late to do what they should have in the first place, which is to shift to an online format that they charge readers for. Hey, the bloggers are getting their news content for free just by picking it out of online news sites. We could start there. Oh, but then they might not have anything left to blog about...unless they got off their butts to get their own content.