It's time for newspapers to get tough or die.

MY newspaper has been delivered later than usual for about a week now, and in our household that's serious stuff. My early-morning routine requires the paper to be on the driveway at a certain hour; otherwise, I go a tittle crazy, calling the Times' automated phone system every 10 minutes and wandering up and down my street to see whether the delivery guys mixed up the houses.

Eventually, a battered Sentra pulls up with two fellows making their appointed rounds. They're huffing and puffing and one of them says he's sorry for the late service. Poor guys--delivering a product through a distribution channel that is pretty much washed up. Even I'm starting to lose faith.

Last Monday came the bad news: newspaper circulation fell 2.6 percent for the six-month period ended Sept. 30. All told, 789 newspapers nationwide reported circulation declines--including 18 of the 20 largest. Publishers tried to be upbeat about the numbers, but it's hard to take their words seriously--not with Wall Street taking bets that several of the big chains will be broken up.

A couple of years ago, such a prospect would have been laughable. Not anymore. Knight Ridder's largest shareholder, Private Capital Management, called for a sale of the company--or at least parts of it--and now it wants to nominate its own directors to the board. Two other large shareholders also suggested a sale of the chain, which includes the San Jose Mercury News, Miami Herald and Philadelphia Inquirer. Whether anything comes of those "suggestions" is less important than the environment in which they are being made.

The day after the circulation numbers were released, Merrill Lynch media analyst Lauren Rich Fine issued a report about Tribune Co., parent of the Los Angeles Times, that outlined several scenarios on how the Chicago-based media company could get more value for shareholders--including the sale of its newspapers. "The company is under pressure to start investing in higher growth, higher return areas and/or monetize some of its current assets," the report said.

Monetize current assets--you know what that means. Dumpsville.

It's not difficult for newspaper people to glom onto these scary developments and conclude that all is lost. Former Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Baker went so far last week as to suggest that "if newspapers are going to die, as most 'smart' people seem to think, let's go down swinging. Let's go down like the Texans at the Alamo," he said on the website Newsthinking. "Let's publish the best, most interesting, most audacious stories we can, on our own terms. Let's not be businessmen. Let's be artists. Let's put our art--the stories we love to write, edit and publish--on the market and see who buys it."

Such defiant nonsense has infused newsrooms for several decades now. Too bad. Here's a news flash for Mr. Baker: Journalists are not artists. They are craftsmen who participate in a collaborative, sometimes creative process that leads to the making of a product. And newspapers, like any product, must satisfy the needs and desires of the customer it is trying to reach. Otherwise, people stop reading.

That's the problem. The traditional newspaper-that is, the thing those huffing and puffing guys deliver to me each morning--has become quite dispensable to the kind of people who used to read a paper without fail. In an Internet age, it's almost quaint to have a static page of newsprint delivering news, much of which has been reported by other sources 12 to 24 hours earlier.

But it's not just the usual online and broadcast suspects that are doing in newspapers. It's the papers themselves, many of them with tired formats going back 20 years or more. It needn't be that way and it's worth noting that some intriguing concepts are being tried out at publications all over the world.

But the R&D efforts are running out of time. Outfits like Private Capital Management don't much care about the tradition and sanctity of newspapers. All they really want is their money--quarter after quarter--and if that means selling off the poor performers like scrap metal, well, that's what they'll do. If this wonderful business is to survive in anything resembling its current form, it will have to come up with some better answers--and fast.

Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal. He can be heard every Tuesday morning at 6:55 and 9:55 on KPCC-FM (89.3).