Who should feel bad about the LAT's decline?

Just about everybody, says law professor and former political consultant Susan Estrich in her column at the Cagle Post:

The once mighty Times has managed to give almost everyone in Los Angeles a reason to hate it, as it cycled through editors and publishers and one staff reduction after another. You don't have to be a youthful new media type to brag about canceling your subscription to the Times, or how you get your news online, or how what used to take half a Sunday to read now only takes half an hour.

Similar snickers, albeit perhaps quieter ones, followed the news that the cash-strapped New York Times was taking out a mortgage to make ends meet. Who needs these dinosaurs?

The answer is: everyone who cares about politics or government or the arts or culture. They do two things that almost no one else does: report and edit.

I get my news online, too. At any time of the day or night, I cruise, checking out what's happening, what's new. I rarely sit down and read a newspaper anymore, not in the old-fashioned way that I used to.

But most of the websites I frequent don't report news themselves. And they don't edit the dispatches of those who do....

Talking about the news is easy. Finding it, digging for it and separating what's accurate from what's not are laborious, time-consuming and often unrewarding tasks. Newspapers, even the best of them, make plenty of mistakes. I've been their target often enough to know that. But in this information age, we need them and the professional standards of reporting and editing to which they aspire, even if they do not always meet them.

There's also a snarky cartoon lampooning Sam Zell business acumen.