Yesterday, we had a brief post written from the point of view of how CBS's 60 Minutes would breathlessly cover a corporate PR stunt--if it didn't involve CBS itself. Meanwhile, Thomas Lifson looks at how the New York Times would cover a recent business cutback...:

A profitable company is to shutter a factory it built in 1992 as part of a much-hailed visionary strategy to take advantage of technology. But now it is just a cost to be cut. Eight hundred jobs, many of them well-paying blue collar positions (supposedly an endangered species) will disappear, while managerial and professional jobs are being protected.

Normally, this would be a juicy target for series of articles on the front and business pages of the New York Times. You know the drill: a parade of blue collar people victimized by the Bush administration, and now facing a bleak future. Meanwhile the insiders make out fine. There’s even a fat cat CEO whose compensation package has done a whole lot better than its profits or stock. If Howell Raines still were editor, he’d get at least 40 stories out of it.

Family shareholders control the New York Times Company through a dual class shareholding system. When Arthur Ochs (“Pinch”) Sulzberger became assistant publisher of the family business in 1987, and then deputy publisher in 1988, he led the investing of hundreds of millions of dollars in modern printing technology. This would mean eventually closing the historic printing presses in Manhattan, where people could pick up the latest news “hot off the press.” The company would build one plant for the east metro in New Jersey and a second plant in Queens. Pinch’s strategy, as he took over more responsibility for the company, anticipated growing circulation and built up the capacity to handle it. But under his leadership, local circulation has plunged.

When it opened in 1992, the new Edison, NJ printing plant featured modern color printing presses able to run color pictures, charts and graphs. More importantly, however, it could print color advertising, which sells for a sizable premium over black & white.

But the Times editorial side was not able to go with color until the company built a second modern printing plant in Queens, on the other side of Manhattan. When that plant came on-stream, the Times silenced its old Manhattan presses, and the physical newspaper was able to enter the wonderful world of color in 1996, only a decade ago.

It was a bold bet on the future of the print medium, just as the internet was getting going. That bet is now being liquidated.

The Times, and apparently also the Wall Street Journal, will find themselves no different than any other newspaper in the country. As more consumers turn to the Internet for the news, the need for newsprint will drop accordingly. Newspapers will have to rethink their business process. Eventually, they will find themselves in the news-delivery service, and that the medium (newsprint) has less importance than the news itself.

Will that change be painful? Of course. However, those who adopt this paradigm early will have the easier transition. Newsprint will probably always be around, or at least for a long while, but the daily delivery process has been eclipsed by the new news cycle. Stories do not break at deadline any more -- and the concept of deadlines and putting the paper to bed will be the first casualties. The Times still holds almost all of its stories until midnight, when they release them on the Internet. Competition with the wire services will eventually mean that papers like the Times will have to release stories as they get approved -- meaning their websites will continually update all through the 24-hour day.

That will eliminate the daily delivery, and as more homes get broadband access to the Internet, that paper on the doorstep becomes increasingly anachronistic. It will get the same slow death that afflicted encyclopedias on the bookshelf: it's out of date as soon as it's received. Consumers demand up-to-the-moment news, and the paper is a museum of yesterday's headlines.

This announcement from the Times is just another step along that process. It's not unique to the Times and doesn't reflect its egregious editorial policies. Newsprint will continue to shrink, and in this case, the process has become literal.