On Monday, the Wall Street Journal's Julia Angwin and Joseph Hallinan put forth one of the more talked about articles of recent note regarding the newspaper industry, and with good reason - it's representative of a seismic shift in the world we live in today, in an iPod coddling, Rosetta Stone kind of way. Angwin and Hallinan report that the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune property, was expected to have circulation numbers that are "likely to be off in excess of 6% of its most recently reported figures." It was actually worse, as the LAT rang up a 6.5% drop year-over-year for daily, and a 7.9% decrease on Sunday, y-o-y. Aptly, Editor & Publisher calls this a "plunge" in the headline heralding the announcement. Patterico says that he's not as worried about circ, as "whether a paper is telling the truth" is more important. While that's probably a smart way to look at it, almost a quarter of persons who voted on the WSJ's accompanying poll say that "biased reporting" was the reason behind the drops in circulation. Combine that with the 61% that look at "online alternatives" as the primary factor, and the coast is anything but clear.

Tribune tried to keep its eye on the prize in its announcement about the Chicago Tribune, which saw a 6.9% loss daily and 4.7% on Sunday. President and publisher David Hiller said "Circulation is important and we're investing to improve our results, but ultimately readership and audience are what matter most and we maintained our market leading audience of Chicago Tribune readers." Similarly, Gannett SVP of marketing Don Stinson is quoted by the WSJ as saying "Newspaper circulation is important but readership is the key issue..." It is, suddenly, the "key issue?" As that same article points out, readership for newspapers has "only recently begun to be promoted by newspaper publishers."

As a former in-house media buyer, I can say that readership rarely came up in discussions with sales departments at newspapers and any agencies I dealt with, except for special magazine sections. If it's "key," why isn't it found here at the NYT? Why doesn't the LAT have a section here for readership or mention it here? I'm not sure I need to fill in the blanks for you here, but just for fun we'll play a little word game, and it rhymes with "planting your flaws."

G_______ for s_____.

Now to be clear here, I don't believe the death knell for newspapers is what we're talking about, at least as news organizations. But you do the math - if you lose 2% of something year-over-year, for a few years, you'll see a steady fall. But that 2% quickly becomes a bigger number when the publications who are factored the most (read: USA Today, LAT, Chicago Tribune, et al) are looking at drops of more than 5% in a year's time, over and over again. It's like the action movie where the hero starts messing with the timebomb, and after clipping the blue wire, s/he finds that the timer has accelerated - except in this case, the hero hasn't done anything except operate on their best behavior.

Dennis Hopper said it best in "Speed" when he asked Keanu Reeves "You've got three seconds. What do you do? What do you do?"