By Brian Hews, LCCN Publisher

Dan Walters’ column on the latest cuts at the Sacramento Bee tells a sad story, but unfortunately it is one I have watched unfold across the newspaper industry for decades.

I have owned and published a community weekly for more than 40 years. During that time, I have worked alongside plenty of journalists who came from daily newspapers.

The daily and weekly newspaper worlds are very different.

Not ethically. Not journalistically. A reporter is still supposed to get the facts right, ask difficult questions, attend the meetings nobody wants to attend and hold government accountable.

The difference is how the newspaper gets produced — and how it gets paid for.

At a small independent weekly, there is nowhere to hide. Someone has to cover the council meeting. Someone has to file the public records request. Someone has to write the story. Someone has to sell the advertising. Someone has to build the pages, meet the press deadline and make sure the newspaper gets delivered.

And every Friday, you start all over again.

Over the years I hired some very talented people who came from daily newspapers. Some adjusted. Others couldn’t.

They weren’t bad journalists. They simply came from an environment where somebody else generally worried about where the money came from.

At an independent weekly, the connection between journalism and the business that supports it is impossible to ignore. If the advertising doesn’t come in, there isn’t some distant corporate office to make up the difference.

There is no newspaper.

That’s why ownership matters so much.

I’ve watched people who didn’t understand newspapers buy them and then try to operate them like any other business. Today we have the hedge-fund version of the same problem.

The spreadsheet says cut expenses.

So they cut reporters.

Then photographers.

Then editors.

Then pages.

Then printing days.

Then they move the press deadline earlier because it’s cheaper or more convenient operationally.

Eventually they have saved so much money that they’ve destroyed the product they were supposedly trying to save.

Look at the Los Angeles Times.

Its print deadlines became so early that its Sports section could no longer consistently give print readers something as fundamental as the results of games played the night before.

Think about that.

You’re selling somebody a daily newspaper containing yesterday’s sports news because you’ve structured the operation so the newspaper has to be printed before the games are finished.

Then management wonders why people stop buying newspapers.

That’s not the internet’s fault.

The internet unquestionably devastated newspaper economics. Craigslist virtually destroyed classified advertising. Digital advertising took enormous amounts of revenue away from newspapers. Readers changed their habits.

Those are realities every publisher has had to confront.

But bad ownership compounded the problem.

You cannot respond to declining readership by continually making your newspaper less valuable to readers.

Walters makes another point that should concern everyone, whether they subscribe to a newspaper or not.

California once had reporters from newspapers throughout the state covering the Capitol. Local legislators knew somebody back home was watching.

Most of those reporters are gone.

The same thing has happened locally. When newspapers disappear or newsrooms are gutted, there are fewer reporters sitting through city council and school board meetings, reading agendas, examining campaign reports and filing public records requests.

Government doesn’t stop doing things because the reporter disappeared.

It simply has one fewer person watching.

We’ve survived at Los Cerritos Community News because we’ve remained local, independent and advertising-supported. We distribute 40,000 newspapers every Friday.

We’re certainly not the Los Angeles Times or the Sacramento Bee.

But this little community weekly broke what former Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley called “the biggest financial scandal in Los Angeles history,” the Los Angeles County Assessor John Noguez corruption story; and we stayed with it when it mattered, even through several threats from local politicians.

That experience taught me something I’ve never forgotten.

The size of the newspaper isn’t what determines whether it can do important journalism.

You need reporters willing to dig, editors willing to publish what they find — and, perhaps most importantly, an owner who understands why the newspaper exists in the first place.

Once ownership forgets that, all the cost-cutting in the world won’t save it.