As another wag put it, the mass clicking sound you hear is the noise made by thousands of Angelenos unbookmarking the L.A. Times from their browsers.

Starting next week, if you consume more than 15 web articles per month from the Times, you will have to become a digital subscriber to get any more.  The cost? Oh, just $3.99 a week.  z

Translation" $200 a year.

Some people think this is a great idea, a wonderful move to defend quality journalism.  I think it is a dumb move, clearly marking the Times as a dinosaur publication and a move that I believe is almost certainly doomed to fail.

Ah, but wait, say some others. When The New York Times instituted its own similar paywall, it lost almost no web traffic and almost 400,000 readers have made the move to paid digital.  True enough.  With one detail: The New York Times and the L.A. Times are not the same paper.  Whatever the value offered by the user by the NYT, its L.A. counterpart offers a whole lot less. Does anybody really think these two papers are still in the same class? Do you get up Sunday morning raring to rip through the L.A. Times Book Review, the Sunday Magazine, the Week in Review etc etc? What's that you say? They don't exist?

Oh.

The Times has spent the better part of this decade shearing off the content and sections that made it unique. The book section has been eviscerated. The wonderully-written Outdoors section was canned. The Sunday Opinion section has been made as much as invisible and the paper is too damn cheap to hire a single editorial columnist of national stature.  Amazing,

Having long ago given up on the hard copy edition of the paper, I must confess I have lost count of what other sections have been lopped off.  I know a handful of lifestyle sections were axed this month,

Even the news section has been mangled not only by the layoff of scores of reporters, but the Times puts the real and latest news in a second section supplement printed at the last moment because it decided to rent out its evening press run time to the WSJ.

So, the question here is not whether one values or not quality journalism. The question is, how much quality journalism remains at the core of the Los Angeles Times?  Enough to induce you to pay to $200 a year to access it on the Web?

How, then, is the Times to survive?  Good question. And I don't claim to necessarily have the answer. But I know for sure this paywall is not part of it.

Here's a radical idea for survival: how about really retooling the paper for the digital age instead of trying to charge a high premium for the Same Old Same Old?

Retooling would mean offering the reader VALUE-ADDED that might be worth four bucks a week.  This is where Jeff Jarvis axiom from five years ago comes into play: Do What You Do Best and Link To The Rest.

Why would I pay the Times to read its version of the same international, national or even local events that dozens of other outlets are covering pretty much the same way and that I can read for free? Does the Times really have something very different to report on the GOP debate, Jerry Brown's budget, or an earthquake in China that I can't just as easily get for free and instantaneously from hundreds of other sources?  Why should I pay for a Waahington Bureau that is going to crank out the same daily beltway gruel dished out by dozens of others in more or less equal proportions and quality?

What I MIGHT pay for is something unique, something that the Times "does best?"  How about recrafting the publication that offers real and hard-hitting analysis, interpretation and, yes, opinion on these breaking news stories that I can get anywhere else?  Why not dedicate its newsroom to piercing and interpretive local coverage that nobody else has the resources to do?  Why not invest more time and resources in investigative reporting?  And if your taste runs to lighter subjects, fine. Let's see some really exclusive celebrity interviews. Let's see some vigorous Hollywood reporting that blows TMZ and the horrific Nikke Finke out of the water?

In other words, let's see a completely new Los Angeles Times that vigorously competes in the marketplace by offering us content really worth something. I'm tired of being guilt-tripped that by not supporting the Times I am not backing "good journalism."

Bullshit. Fill that paper, or fill that web page with great content I really can't get elsewhere and then call me back. I might offer up a few bucks.