Stop the journalismisms! The media business is chock full of platitudes, most of them wrong.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

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IF THERE'S ANY reason to be saddened by the long, humiliating death of the great American newspaper, it may be that we'll no longer have a treasure trove of tough-sounding catch phrases about the news biz. Where else but in the world of ink-stained wretches could you hear a rule of thumb as proudly meaningless as the late A.M. Rosenthal's "I don't care if you sleep with elephants, as long as you don't cover the circus"? What medium but a pulp paper could spin a straight-faced tautology--"All the news that's fit to print"--into a deathless slogan?

But is anybody paying attention to journalismisms anymore? Some of the greatest shoe-leather truisms are either untrue or widely ignored. As readers continue to flee newspapers, as fewer investors fall for tall tales about "exploding" Web traffic, let's take some time to rethink, or just remember, some of the choicest phrases:

This business is about more than the bottom line. Only decades of monopoly power in (still) relatively secure regional markets could have turned an economic absurdity into a universally believed truth--in this case, the alleged truism that good reporting gets done by people who can follow their noses while being shielded from pressure by advertisers, irate subscription cancelers, and the like. It would be more accurate to say that American reporters produce bad journalism because they're shielded from the economics of the business. You can hear a lot of talk in editorial meetings about whether a given topic has news value, has been covered too often in recent editions of the paper, or meets some standard of worthiness and moral uplift that is undefined but generally understood to be whatever The New York Times would find appropriate. What you won't hear is any consideration of whether anybody on Planet Earth would be interested in reading about it. After all, as one angry photo journalist told Tribune Company CEO Sam Zell early this year, readers are only interested in "pictures of puppy dogs."

That's yesterday's news. Throughout most of the last 15 years, papers avoided the practice of examining Web traffic for guidance about which stories do and do not attract attention. Too bad: They might have learned a lot earlier that the bulk of traffic goes to stories that are more than a week old. In my experience at the opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, stories three days old or older accounted for 80 percent to 90 percent of Web readership on a daily...