As Mark Steyn recently noted on the L.A. Times' Brian Grazer scandalette:

The first responsibility of a newspaper is to produce something readable. If you don’t do that, nobody’s ever going to get to experience your fabulous ethical integrity. The Times, like all the other dreary monodailies across the land, has forgotten that these days nobody needs to buy a newspaper: it’s a discretionary item. The only difference is that, unlike The Nowheresville Sun-Herald-Picayune-Indicator, the Times is the monodaily of the entertainment capital of the planet and it’s somehow decided that virtue requires it to be the dullest newspaper on the face of the earth.

In his latest update, Mickey Kaus explores how the Times of both coasts manages to cast off readers right and left. On the left coast, it's avoiding funny, gossipy writers like the late Miss Seipp; on the right, it's putting your best columnists behind a firewall that compared to your gross revenues, rakes in peanuts a year.

Read the whole thing; cricket bat ala Ian Faith optional.