To keep hitting those high quarterly profit targets, conglomerates such as Knight Ridder, which owns more than 50 papers, including the Mercury News; the Hearst Corp., which owns 30 papers, including the Chronicle; and the New York Times Co., which owns the Boston Globe, are streamlining costs at every turn -- including personnel. Knight Ridder and the New York Times Co. alone have laid off a total of 2,900 employees this year.

The guiding philosophy of newspapers today may well be epitomized by this comment from Wall Street media analyst Lauren Rich Fine: "Until you can show me that your subscribers are willing to pay more money because of the quality, I sort of feel like the average reader isn't that sensitive to the quality at a certain level, and you really do need to make decisions that sometimes seem short-term in nature, because you chose to go public, and shareholders really do deserve a return."

When newspapers were independently owned, quality did matter. Good editors could please small segments of their communities, like people who love books, because the money in the balance wasn't a frightening amount. Now, paranoia rules in newspapers because the big company's billions are at stake. Editors are now under extreme pressure to tap the widest possible audience. As a result, they are abandoning the journalistic risks and literary quirks that once made the morning paper feel alive and important.

The mad drive to stay in touch with the mass audience has also put newspapers under the reign of almighty market research. Ask executive newspaper editors why book coverage is among the first elements to go and they direct your attention to their focus groups, which they insist show that book reviews rank lower in readers' esteem than the Wednesday column on flower arranging. Whether focus groups accurately reflect what people really want is beside the point. Book reviews are being cavalierly dispatched by newspapers because they have become disposable.

Now that's the place to pause. After all, you might think newspapers would benefit from courting their community's most passionate readers. People who read about books, not to mention those willing to crack a book itself, are inclined to ignore the putative enemy, TV, and get their news by reading -- that is, from a newspaper.

But in their frenzy to gain a mass readership, pump up ad revenues and keep shareholders happy, newspapers end up dissing their most sympathetic audience. You have to admit that seems a little soft in the head. Cutting book reviews from newspapers is like Porsche saying, "Our customers really love to drive, so let's install lousy shocks in the chassis and make the engine sputter at high rpm."

For those with a sense of humor, this cockeyed approach to publishing is a shining example of how the corporate world has completely warped the value of the written word. For those who believe that newspapers should be a lively part of America's literary life and culture, that book reviews help keep us hungry to read, well, it's not quite so funny.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"