Of course, newspapers also have a duty to be reliable, accurate, interesting and entertaining - no small feat and nearly impossible as resources dwindle. Thus, instead of cutting where it counts to satisfy shareholders, corporate honchos should be infusing newsrooms with more money to hire more staff - especially those who give newspapers their soul, their personality, their "thing."

One of the most controversial cuts in recent weeks was the firing of columnist Robert Scheer and editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez at the L.A. Times, a Tribune paper. Scheer's departure has been explained as the result of the new editorial page editor's shuffling voices.

But there's no satisfactory explanation for why Ramirez won't be replaced. The decision to eliminate the in-house cartoonist symbolizes a lack of understanding among those who hold the purse strings about what's needed to save newspapers. Cartoon and column space can be filled with syndicated material, but the human quality is diminished when a paper's own in-house voices are lost to the cost-cutting void.

Not long ago, when you said Chicago, you thought "Royko," for example. In the Carolinas as I was coming along, no cartoonist was better known than The Charlotte Observer's Doug Marlette for his skewering of Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker. He won a Pulitzer for his troubles.

What made people like Royko and Marlette distinctive, besides their talent, was that they belonged to their communities, not just their newspapers. They wrote and cartooned about local issues that affected readers' daily lives, not just national topics of general interest. Readers felt connected to them and, therefore, to their newspapers.

They picked up the paper each day just to see what those guys were up to. They might even bump into them at the local pub.

Twenty years ago there were 200 staff political cartoonists compared with fewer than 90 today. As corporate bean counters look for new cuts, they might consider that there's a connection between the hemorrhaging their shareholders feel and the bloodied newsrooms they're leaving behind.