Business lessons

Here's the perfect companion piece to the Columbia Journalism Review's recent feature about the damage done to The Dallas Morning News through its current policy of cutting staff to achieve greatness (a "death model" followed by many American papers these days): In The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker writes about two new books on current state of the press, and concludes that the greatest harm done to print journalism has hardly been from the Internet (which gets only a couple of paragraphs).

It's the stupid management, stupid.

And it has been the owners, who turned everything over to the business managers. So the next time a newspaper announces it's trimming or killing its book reviews, remember: It's not because of New Media, it's not rising illiteracy, it's not from any purported loss in advertising from the publishing industry. The cutback is the direct result of management decisions on what to value, which readers to sacrifice, how to please Wall Street.