Blaming the Customer

The San Francisco Chronicle loses columnist Ken Garcia to the free Examiner:

the Chronicle had lost more circulation than any newspaper in the United States in the last year — by a whopping margin. [The] publisher decreed that the steep circulation decline was actually welcome, because they wanted higher quality readers, not those shabby subscribers who were apparently picking it up on the cheap.

The Chron must be pleased, because I'm one of those lower quality readers who stopped his subscription after 20 years. The paper that I loved to read is no more. The great stable of columnists--Delaplane, Hoppe, McCabe, and the greatest of them all, Herb Caen--is long gone, and the current crop, much like today's football 49ers, has only the uniform in common with the giants who have gone before. Yes, the Chron's problem must be the quality of its readership.