Heartbreaking to see what's happening

I went out to my driveway this morning to get my paper.

I try to get it early because the carrier leaves it in a place where the runoff from the lawn sprinklers will hit it, and even though it's in a plastic wrap, it doesn't stay dry.

I got it early enough, but I was stunned to see how light the paper was when I lifted it. The Los Angeles Times seems to be getting smaller every day, which might not seem like such a big deal to some of you but really bothers me.

I don't know if you've noticed, but there have been literally thousands of newspaper jobs eliminated this year, most of them never to return. Media moguls from Dean Singleton at Media News -- my former employer -- to Sam Zell with the Tribune Company have bemoaned the economic situation and have said that every job cut was necessary.

Of course they're lying, or at least being disingenuous. What Singleton, Zell and the others never tell you is that their papers are not losing money, they're just making smaller profits. They overextended themselves to buy additional properties and were counting on the traditionally large profit margins newspapers enjoy to service their massive debt.

I don't really blame Singleton all that much. With a few exceptions, most of the papers he owns are too big to be true community papers and too little to be really good or really important. Nobody over the age of 5 sets their life's goal as working at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin or other papers like it. Folks at papers of that size fall into three categories -- kids on their way up, people with strong ties to the community and older journalists who have reached their highest level and are too comfortable or too burned out to leave.

Most of the time, papers like the Daily Bulletin or other Media News properties do good work in good times and squeeze every nickel till it screams in bad times. Nobody really expects them to be good, so it's a nice surprise when they are.

But there are newspapers, at least a handful of them in this country, that are iconic. Call them papers of record if you will, but papers like the Los Angeles Times are places where kids thinking of going into journalism dream of working. They're papers that cover stories all over the world, and seeing them make massive cuts in their editorial department is hurt heartbreaking.

Bloggers can't replace the kind of journalism papers like the Times does.

We'll all suffer for its loss.