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In many newsrooms, however, morale is hitting an all-time low--though journalists are famously cranky. For example, at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is under pressure from parent company Knight-Ridder to boost profit margins from 8% to 12% this year and 15% the next, staff members cite with dismay the collapse of the time-honored wall between "church" and "state"--the editorial side and the business side--which is meant to ensure journalistic integrity. The head of circulation now sits in on story meetings, while reporters and editors must take "business literacy" classes to learn how the publishing side works.

At the Los Angeles Times, employees entering the building are greeted by an LED display of parent company Times Mirror's stock price--an irksome reminder that their CEO, Mark H. Willes, is wielding one of the sharpest axes in the industry. In 1995, his first year on the job, Willes slashed a grand total of 3,000 jobs, including almost 800 that died along with the New York edition of Newsday--which hemorrhaged some $100 million in its 10 years of life--and 140 newsgathering positions at the once fabulously profitable L.A. paper.

The great worry, according to Bill Kovach, a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution editor who heads the Nieman Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is that "newspapers are trying to save money in the newsrooms, but they are undercutting the quality of their news reports. It's taking the life right out of them." The San Francisco Examiner, for instance, still runs foreign news, but without a single overseas correspondent on staff. Under instructions from parent company Knight-Ridder to boost its margins from 16% to 18%, the Miami Herald will cut 300 jobs by the end of this year. Once considered a competitor of the New York Times and the Washington Post and famed for winning seven Pulitzers in the 1980s alone, the Herald has responded by shifting its focus to regional coverage and "news you can use."

And while there is fat to be trimmed in many news organizations--and it is worth pointing out that journalists' salaries have increased in recent years--sometimes the cuts reflect a lack of understanding of newspapers' unique needs. At the Inquirer, which won 17 Pulitzer Prizes in 18 years under its former editor, Eugene Roberts Jr., staff members cite attempted cost-reducing measures that range from ridiculous to troubling: last year reporters were told they could not dial directory assistance, and at one brief point all long-distance calls were banned, as was travel to New York City, all of two hours away. "Morale has been low, there's no denying that," says the paper's executive editor, Robert Rosenthal.

Yet editor Maxwell King insists that the Inquirer has "managed to stay whole in all the important ways." This fall, for instance, the paper ran a series, "America: Who Stole the Dream?," for which two reporters spent more than two years, beginning before the 1995 cutbacks, researching the loss of decent jobs for blue-collar workers. King does not object to the demand for double-digit profitability, but he does wonder what further compromises may be necessary to achieve it. "We have stuck stubbornly to substance, and we've lost a lot of circulation," he says. "What makes a newspaper successful? Does this high-end stuff sell?"