The results are in ...

... and they look dreadful for all the newspapers that are desperately cutting their staffs (and book sections and arts sections) to keep up their profit margins for Wall Street and the stockholders. It turns out it doesn't work. In fact, it's a horrid idea -- just as serious journalists and serious readers have been saying. It hurts quality coverage. It loses readers. It loses advertising. And the internet isn't exactly the future salvation that many hold out, either.

Craig Flournoy and Tracey Everbach have been working for months for The Columbia Journalism Review on a feature analysis of the consequences of the layoffs and cutbacks at The Dallas Morning News the past two years. The story just went up online and it makes for grim reading. The story looks at not just the fallout for the newspaper -- although it paints a thoroughly bleak picture of that -- but also the results for individual reporters, photographers, editors. Disclosure: book/daddy took part in the survey and is briefly quoted.

The departing journalists have generally found new jobs and are happy. (Ahem. Yes, well, book/daddy is always the exception.) That's pretty much the only good news. Everything else is bad. What people like the National Book Critics Circle have been arguing for months -- that such cutbacks will hurt coverage, that they will result in the loss of readers, that this is not a way forward but just a way to even more cutbacks -- is vindicated by the story. A paper can't lose high-quality journalists and expect readers won't notice the change in coverage. And tweaking the website doesn't make up the difference. Mr. Flournoy and Ms. Everbach do a fine job of taking apart the spin put out by the News by setting it against surveys, statistics, expert opinions. It is a devastating analysis. Put simply, this was not an inevitable decline; it was the result of bungling management.

One hopes every newspaper management reads it. And one fully expects it won't make much difference, given the dunderheaded thinking that got newspapers into this mess in the first place.