Heard the news? Everyone is talking about falling readership, including the Miami Herald Philadelphia Inquirer's Leonard Pitts, Jr.:

Dear colleagues:

Have you had enough bad news?

I don't mean the bad news we report. No, I'm talking about the steady diet of doom and/or gloom that goes with working for a daily newspaper these days. I'm talking about reports that, despite all the focus groups, re-designs, shorter stories and bigger typefaces we employ, readership is still falling like a boulder from a skyscraper.

Publisher Augustine Edwards says he will soon offer a financial incentive for his staff to write stories readers want to read. A reporter's salary will be based on how many clicks he or she racks up online.

Colleagues, I can hear you harrumphing from here. This will never happen in a U.S. newsroom, you say. We have higher standards. We take our profession too seriously.

All I can say is that you must work in a different newspaper business than I do. The one I work in has been hijacked by bean counters. It is a place where costs are cut with the glee of an ax murderer, talented people are being shoveled out the door and editors are required to prostrate themselves before the altar of the holy profit margin. It's not hard for me to imagine newspapers in that industry following the Chilean lead.

After all, what would we have to sacrifice? The obligation to be a watchdog of the public interest? The mind-set that says maybe you publish a story because readers need to know a thing even if they don't know they need to know it?

Get over yourself. How 20th century can you be?

As Edwards puts it, "I am not of the school that says, 'Eat porridge, it's good for you.' I'm focused not on what people should be reading, but on uniting them around what they want to be reading."

In other words, no more stories about budget deficits, congressional hearings, and other boring stuff nobody really cares about. From now on, no news but fun news.

Welcome to the future, guys. Enjoy.

If you need me, I'll be running a little bed and breakfast outside Modesto. Look me up if you're ever in the area.

Let's start with what people "should" be reading. To separate that from what people want to be reading strikes me as a proper job not for a journalist, but for a parent of a lazy child who'd rather spend the summer watching TV or reading comic books when he should be reading Charles Dickens.

How is what "should" be read or what people want to read a journalistic function in any way? While there's no way around the fact that some people will find certain stories more interesting than others (that's why most newspapers have different sections for things like sports, business, entertainment, human interest, local news, etc.), there's ultimately no way to force anyone to read anything, much less make them want to read it. One person may want one thing, another person may think he should want something else.

I mean, suppose, like Leonard Pitts, Jr. you're a bit of a political junkie. This means that politics and political developments (maybe even political gossip) is what you want to read about. It strikes me as the height of arrogance to decide that other people should want to read what you want to read.

I tend to ditch the sports sections as well as entertainment and fashion sections. Should I be reading them? Probably. I can't tell you anything about "Friends" (a show I have never watched) nor do I know much about which sports team is ahead. I don't read SciFi either. I consider it regrettable to be so culturally illiterate, but I'd be very suprised if I opened my paper only to be greeted by scornful editorials telling me that my newspaper will go broke because I'm not reading enough stories about TV programming or fashion. Or that I should care whether the contents of the sports section is henceforth to be driven by ratings and popularity of the various sports and teams.

But it's a fact of life that politics and current events are placed in the category of shoulds, while fashion, entertainment and sports are in the category of wants.

What about bias? Would I care whether a local sports columnist favored the Philadelphia Eagles (pronounced "Iggles") over a rival team? Would I have as much fun scrutinizing his columns for evidence of bias, parsing his thoughts for logical errors, as I might with a column apologizing for or minimizing Kofi Annan's corruption or misstating the history of the Vietnam War? I doubt it.

But hey, I'm feeling reckless and dangerous, so let's give it the old college try, right now! This is from today's Philadelphia Inquirer Sports Page:

This game was 6 ounces of water in a 12-ounce glass. The way you view it says as much about you as it does the Eagles.

Was it, at long last, a competitive game with an NFC East rival? Or was it proof that the division is so bad, the Eagles can turn in a stinker and still win?

So which is it? Are you an optimist or a pessimist, a believer or a cynic?

Does this make my preference for politics over sports a correct one? Should everyone else prefer politics to sports? How the hell should I know? I'm not here to judge the readers of this blog, but I guess now that I think about it, if I spent more time on sports and entertainment I might draw more readers who want that, and I might eventually lose the political junkies if I went too far. Considering the plethora of sports talk radio around here, it wouldn't surprise me if more people read sports blogs than political/cultural satire, but sports blogging is not what I do.

Should I?

I don't see how to make the word "should" enter into my thinking or that of any reader. I write about what I want, because what I want to write about is what interests me. Often, I think I should write about something (Mr. Pitts' column is a perfect example) and then I force myself to write about it. But the decision to force myself results from my own moral judgment on myself; whether readers want me to do it or want to read it is something over which I have no control.

What if I played the role of Leonard Pitts' hypothetical editor?

I will write not about what you want to read, but what I think you SHOULD be reading. No more fun! I'm not going to unite you around what you want to read, but I will feed you politically correct porridge. You will eat it, and you will like it!

Otherwise, it's to bed without breakfast for the lot of you!

Before you go to bed, though, here are a couple of items which may (depending on reader preferences) fit into either the "shoulds" or the "wants" categories of discipline and restraint. (The former is from a blog recently linked by Glenn Reynolds, the latter (via Drudge) is a favorite old theme.)

Is the pleasure/pain principle implicated here? I'm reminded of one of life's lessons which I still refuse to learn.

Well after my adolescent crisis had passed (but before my midlife crisis had been fully developed), a well-meaning relative honestly believed that I should play golf even though I hated it. He thought that it was socially the right thing to do, that it would advance one's career, and all that morally righteous stuff. But the bottom line for him was that he loved golf! So, he could carry on all he wanted about how golf was good and even virtuous, but the fact remained that it was fun for him, and torture for me. The odd thing is, when I was a kid I noticed that many of the harder working men used to criticize men who enjoyed playing golf as shirkers of their responsibilities. (Like the doctor out whacking a golfball while his patient dies from complications.)

Where does that leave someone like me who, if I played golf, would absolutely hate it? Shouldn't I get some moral "credit" if I force myself to do something that I hate? Is it fair that others would have a good time doing it? How do we know that many of the people who lecture us about what we "should" do aren't secretly enjoying themselves while doing what they want and scolding the rest of us for not wanting what they want?

Why should I want to do that?

MORE: In a related vein, here's Roger L. Simon on freedom of thought:

If there's one thing I have learned in the last few years it's that allegiance to any political party should be transitory. I don't care what the party thinks. I care what I think. The minute it is the other way round, I have lost freedom of thought. The same thing is true of "isms" for me.

(And what if it is the Culture War? Are we being rendered increasingly unable to see individual people through a vast "cultural" forest of "isms?" With simple language being ever distorted and simple communication ever obfuscated, how are we to know?)