Charlie Madigan at the Chicago Tribune turns his astute eye on two "seemingly unrelated events" that illustrate how the Web is changing journalism.

The first event that troubles Madigan: the Bakersfield Californian's new website re-design. The site no longer hosts a spot for national news. - the reason given by those who run the site: "local users displayed no interest" in national news.

How did a local paper's front-page web presence get hyper-local? Madigan notes that many media companies made incursions into Internet news in the 1990's, but by 2000, management became convinced that "the venture was not going to produce solid, dependable returns." This left an opening for marketing and advertising departments to construct "a new model aimed at building products that would be consumer-driven and immensely responsive to local audience interests and needs."

About what's happened with the Bakersfiled Californian, Madigan concludes: "In Bakersfield, it means local news will get almost all of the attention because the numbers say that is what people click on. One might make all the flowery arguments about the public's need to know about the world and the nation. You will have to go elsewhere to find that, unless you enjoy blogs, which is where national news will be pondered in Bakersfield."

The second change troubling Madigan is the Washington Post's early retirement/"fat buyout" of 70 reporters, editors, photographers and administrators. The buyout was, in part, stimulated by decreasing revenues at the Post.

While Madigan states that the departure of "hundreds and hundreds of years of experience" might create openings for newly-minted j-school grads, there may be something short-sighted about a strategy that implies "there is no value to experience, nothing that can't be replaced with a greener (and presumably cheaper) candidate."

Summing up the two events, Madigan sees the Californian's website changes as the emergence of "a set of values has evolved that is so market-driven that it supports abandoning a fundamental journalism obligation, telling people what is happening in their world, from the front porch to the most distant corner of the Earth, whether they are comfortable with it or not." Pandering to audience dynamics -- or the customers as editors -- could result in TV-style "if it bleeds, it leads" reporting of news that perpetuates wrong impressions of crime and of minorities.

As for the changes at the Post, "the world is turned on its ear as experience becomes a disadvantage, not an asset." Change, then, might not be good "when you measure what is lost in the process"