How do they do it at the JS? Do editors sit around the table and argue about whose picture is going to run this time with a story that treats readers like complete and total morons?

Tom Koetting drew the short straw today. His picture graces the story headlined “Beginning today, one edition for local news” which actually asks us to believe that after years and years of separate zoned suburban sections, like the Waukesha edition, the bosses at the JS realized that readers don’t want that! No, they want news in one edition! Really! Honest! They do!

We have to read to somewhere in the the middle of the story to get to the obvious overriding factor in the change: oh, yeah, economics has something to do with all this, too.

Koetting, when he’s not carrying treating readers like cognitively impaired infants, is an excellent editor. If a reporter filed a story that said “City Hall announced today that it would reduce garbage pickup to once a month because many residents said they were interested in composting and recycling,” he would undoubtedly reject the story and have a word or several dozen for the reporter as well.

That would be the case even if, somewhere in the middle of the story, our limited-ability reporter threw in a paragraph that said, “Monthly garbage pick-ups are also the wisest use of city resources during challenging economic times.”

JS readers likely are well aware of the huge turmoil in the newspaper industry. It’s OK to tell us the truth — cutting suburban editions saves money and the paper really, really needs to do that to survive. It’s also OK to tell us that it will indeed affect what we read. Trying to cram more suburban news into a single local edition obviously will affect coverage and content — the change will not, as Koetting contends, be “for many of you…almost imperceptible.”

That’s the kind of thing that should only be in the funny pages.