The day after the debut of TimesSelect, The New York Times announced that it would cut 500 jobs from its papers, including 45 newsroom jobs at the NYT, and 35 at The Boston Globe.

This news followed an announcement in Philadelphia of a buyout plan that would cut 100 jobs from the city’s two leading newspapers, the Inquirer and the Daily News.

Reaction in the blogosphere has been mixed; Dan Rubin of Blinq presents a good survey of local reactions here. He highlights the post of Karl Martino at Philly Future, who wrote a long and informative rumination on the cuts.

At a time of increasing media centralization and corporatization, these cuts are disheartening. In theory, at least, newspapers perform an essential service for our democracy by helping to keep our citizenry informed.

The open question is whether or not they have been doing a good job of that.

Despite faux-trend articles such as this (expertly dissected by Jack Shafer in Slate — hat tip to Atrios), I would argue that America’s newspapers have done a better job of reporting the news than America’s cable news networks, which, much more than blogs, are to blame for the current predicament.

The problem with these newsroom cuts is that they slice away at the heart of the most important function of newspapers. We need more hard-news reporting, not less. And we certainly don’t need newspapers to turn into institutionalized blogs.

That’s not to say that newspapers can’t support good blogs — see Attytood, Blinq, and the young Philadelphia Will Do for evidence of that — but its worrisome to see newspapers adding blogs to their websites even as they cut jobs from their news divisions.

Along these lines, Jay Rosen at PressThink has a provocative argument about TimesSelect: the newspaper is overvaluing its columnists, and severely undervaluing its hard-news reporting. A commenter on PressThink wrote the following:

Ay, there’s the rub.

While I certainly would not pay fifty dollars to read New York Times Op-Ed writers, I think that I might pay that much for hard news and investigative reporting. Robust newsrooms that challenge politicians instead of repeating their talking points are worth fighting for, and worth paying for.

Unfortunately, many newspapers haven’t gotten that message.

Until they do, America’s newspapers are going to continue to lose ground to upstart competitors such as TatteredSelect.

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