It's a simple game...

...You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball. And sometimes it rains.

An OJR interview with Bob Cauthorn of the San Francisco Chronicle is easily our must-read of the week.

The money shot (links and emphasis mine):

You're relevant. That's right, you're relevant. They'll buy you next week. See, this is the point to drive home ... is that every newspaper leader in America and every journalist in America should be paying close attention ... Because there's a message for everybody. There's a very powerful moral for everybody and it should be viewed as an opportunity to renew our compact with our audience. A compact that we've walked away from over generations.

And the message here – and it is a "It's a Wonderful Life" kind of moment – the message here is that our readers are waiting for us to come back home.

We're the ones who have strayed. It's not the readers who are straying from us.

It's us who have strayed from our readers... 

...We gotta start firing editors. We have to at some point or other face the fact that the circulation numbers are down because nobody wants to read this [expletive] product. Make it the product we want, and we'll read it.

OJR: Make it be relevant.

Cauthorn: That's right. This is not a complicated business.