Today’s Sunday paper is down to 76 pages (plus ad flyers, supplements, and comics). Weekday papers this past month have had as few as 26 pages. (That’s not the “news hole;” that’s the whole paper, ads and all.)

I’m not calling this feature a “death watch,” because the Times still has a lot further down it could go.

As yet, no major US city has lost all its daily papers. None probably will.

But the papers that remain could become unrecognizable. They could become tiny journals of record, like slightly more mass-market versions of the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. They could become glorified pundit-newsletters promoting the local business community’s agenda of the day. They could become, to borrow from the old National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody, “newscasts in print,” lurid sheets emphasizing crimes, fires, and mayhem.