By TIM GALLAGHER

Freddie Mercury of the musical group Queen may have been the prophet of journalism when he sang, “Another one bites the dust.”

Indeed, James O’Shea left as editor of the Los Angeles Times last month over a dispute about the budget for the newsroom the newsroom that produces journalism in the giant newspaper 365 days a year. Editors drop regularly at the Los Angeles Times these days. Publishers disappear, too. Managing editors. Vice presidents of advertising. Spring Street has become the stopping point for forwarded mail.

It is not that the Times is so different from any newspaper these days. I left as publisher of the largest newspaper in Ventura County last year. Same thing happened to the publisher at the Orange County Register. And I have lost track of the revolving door publishers at the L.A. Daily News. Advertising dollars formerly spent in newspapers, especially the classified advertising “Big Three” (employment, automobile and real estate), have been cascading to Internet competitors. Newspaper corporate leaders were reluctant to embrace the Internet when they should have in the 1990s and now cannot catch up. They are asking advertisers to pay more for a smaller audience.

Hence, the need for expense cuts.

At the L.A. Times, most every editor or publisher who has quit or been fired in the past five years has done so because he felt the quality of the newspaper was going to suffer if these cuts were enacted.

Newspaper people, especially newsroom people, like to think they are special and somehow above all the corporate cost-cutting in the country. Why are 100 newsroom jobs at the L.A. Times more important than 12,000 jobs cut at Delta Airlines?

One reason is choice. You do not have many real choices for news about your local community. TV skims the surface streets, especially if there is a good car chase. Radio, with rare exceptions, cannot match the depth or breadth. Weeklies are good, but once a week.

The other reason is that, with a few exceptions, the best journalists work for daily newspapers and the best daily newspaper journalists work for the big daily newspapers. When good journalists go away, coverage of an area’s institutions and businesses suffers. And the Times has had many, many good journalists.

Readers suffer

The Times is criticized for its perceived liberal bias. It is criticized for not covering the region with greater depth. On the other hand, the Times has produced some of the best journalism in the world in the last seven or eight years.

Pulitzers are one of the few awards that really stand for something, and the Times has won a slew of them. Thirty-eight in all, 14 since 2000. The Times has uncovered corruption in the entertainment business (1999 Pulitzer), written persuasively about the treatment of the mentally ill on the streets (2002), covered wildfires like no one else (2004), and discovered major medical and racial problems at a renowned L.A. hospital (2005).

I mean it. These guys are good. These are important local stories. If the Times did not cover them, maybe no one would.

But when you keep cutting, the good journalists leave. The reporting suffers.

The readers suffer. The scalawags get away with more.

And that last point might be most important for the vitality of Southern California. No one keeps an eye on the community like a good local paper.

Good reporting takes time and fact-checking. You sometimes need three days to chase a lead that goes nowhere. When journalists are cut from the newsroom, fewer people are required to do that same amount of work. The journalist cannot take the time to make the extra phone call, check the additional public documents or SEC filings. The story is due soon and there is no one to pick up the slack.

So if you want to get away with something, keep rooting for newsroom cuts. Aside from overburdened criminal investigators, the reporters are the only ones checking up on things. And there are fewer and fewer of them these days.

Tim Gallagher was a publisher and editor for 29 years. He is now president of Gallagher 20/20 Consulting in Westlake Village.