Who do you want in a digital knife fight?

The long knives go slit-slit faster and deeper at benighted newspapers. Publishers reserve the longest, sharpest blades for slicing off their own noses to spite their faces.

It's the darndest thing. Newsroom budgets have a one-for-one ratio of product quality. So where does the front office slash? Why, the very place that would bring in more customers for themselves and their advertisers.

Ad reps advise clients to buy more space in a downturn when merchants need more traffic. They don't do it. They advertise less. But that's the argument.

When publishers need a better product to boost the bottom line, they invariably cut back too. If that's not hypocritical, it's sure short-sighted and makes for a brutal nose job.

They imagine they are in the business of printing words on paper. So they reduce pages and the wordsmiths to fill them.

The truth is, they really are in the information business. They need constantly to create demand and to generate ad attraction with more and better information. But they do the old biz school thing that reduces costs in a version of supply side economics instead of spending wisely to create product demand.

The newspaper industry is a metaphor for failed imagination.

If Silicon Valley had thought that way, I'd be writing this on an upright typewriter instead of a computer.

That's why I like the advice of columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., although he admits he was slow coming to his own view. The Internet should be at the core of journalism, not off to one side, he now writes http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/story/574088.html

"And then maybe we should hire away the bright people who figured out how to make Yahoo and Google profitable and ask them to make our sites profitable, too."

Go, Leonard.

Publishers recognize the virtual world when their IT Departments show them. But they're not thriving in it like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, now competing with downloadable texts via Kindle, http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA or like Craig Newmark, the Internet entrepreneur taking the classifieds away from conventional print http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/user_accounts.

Bezos and Newmark and all the Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other dagger gaggles may look like a publisher's worst nightmare.

But if I'm in a knife fight, I want a guy who's good with a stiletto at my side.