A tough place for The Times

All the new-versus-old media mumbo jumbo notwithstanding, the dynamic at work here is no more complicated than the economics of a corner store: You can't keep giving people less and less and charging them the same or more for it -- no matter how fancy your packaging is. Yet that's exactly what a strategy of newspaper management that relies mainly on cost-cutting to achieve its goals proposes to do.

In that context, a couple of the points The Times' new publisher made in his analysis this week are well worth sharing with the paper's readers, as well as its staff. Hiller wrote, for example, that The Times needs to do more to reach its "English-speaking Hispanic audience." That's certainly true, but it also needs to do more to connect with the Chinese American communities of the San Gabriel Valley and a Korean American community that is economically concentrated in the Mid-Wilshire area but residentially dispersed. It also needs to take serious notice of the numerically smaller but astonishingly successful Armenian, Russian, Persian, Pakistani and Indian immigrant communities and their Americanized children. And, as long as we're in the business of parsing readership by ethnic background, it's worth considering that The Times' circulation area is home to an African American middle class that rivals that of Atlanta and to an extraordinarily loyal Jewish readership that demands sophisticated news coverage and commentary from Washington and the Middle East.

Welcome to L.A. and to the publishing reality that, across the region, you identify Times readers by their education, income and passion for news that matters to them. That news, as expensive as it may be to cover, occurs all over the country and the world, as well as in the readers' own backyards. When readers such as The Times' use the word "local," they mean not only what occurs down the street but also what's of interest to them nationally and globally.

In his analytic report to The Times staff this week, Hiller also wrote of the paper's need to consider how to reallocate resources and reduce expenses in the period ahead. "What we do in applying our great resources to our mission and business has to follow our vision of where we are taking the business over the next five years and beyond. It is clear that some of this will require moving resources from print to online, and other growth areas. It also means continuing to reduce costs in the core print business, across every area of the company and doing so thoughtfully and strategically."

If the Tribune Co. or its successor as owner of the Los Angeles Times continues to "reduce costs" by cutting the paper's staff in the interests of maintaining a profit margin of 20% or better, then the only way to reinvigorate local coverage and to establish the kind of strong online presence that will guarantee the paper's future is to stop doing something we now do for readers or to do it less thoroughly and less well, hoping that those readers just won't mind.

Nothing is impossible, of course, but some things are highly improbable.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com.