The troubles with newspapers

I suppose this has been covered before but so be it. I'll keep it brief.

The troubles with newspapers--because it's far more than one problem--are that, because they're losing more and more advertisers, they have to charge more and more for their paper, for one.

Secondly, then, we, as newspaper readers (devourers?), get less and less paper, both in quantity and quality.

To wit: two things come to mind today.

Did you see today's issue? Section A of the paper is 17 pages long. If you saw it, you may have reacted to it the way I did and evaluated it the same way, too.

Seven of those 17 pages--seven--were full page ads.

I don't know about other newspaper readers but I feel like a sucker when I get one anymore, unless there's at least one good source of information in at least one column that day. That's a fairly low standard for them to hit and usually, honestly, to me, the Star doesn't even hit that too many times.

The 2nd thing that was brought to my attention (via Tony's KC Blog and Bottomline Communications) is that there are, apparently, to be more layoffs, still, at the Star.

Yikes.

Those poor people down there.

But how about us, the readers, too?

There's just so much less content (quantity) and much less good writing (quality) in the paper, really, how can they expect us to keep taking that thing?

I want to take the paper but just can't justify it.

And I don't see how they can blame us, either.