MORE MEDIA RETRENCHMENT:

The Boston Globe is consolidating its daily paper into four sections as part of a redesign that will launch Friday, Oct. 24. The paper will no longer publish a free-standing business section — it will be folded into the a newly named “Metro” section — except on Sundays.

The Globe, which has seen its revenue and circulation plummet in recent years, says it will save about 24 pages per week in printing costs.

Of course, by giving readers less, they probably won’t reverse the plummeting circulation trend. I continue to think that newspapers, and other media, might help their situations by producing a better product, with more useful and interesting news and less half-baked opinion, but that strategy doesn’t seem to be as popular with management as trimming page-counts and the like.

UPDATE: Reader Bob Schneider writes: “The pleasure some (not necessarily you) have at watching newspapers decline is unseemly. You know as well as anyone that it’s hard to do good reporting, and although the liberal bias of many cannot be excused, for the majority of stories it’s a nonissue. Liberal and conservative alike will miss the great dailies. ” Well, yes — and I certainly don’t look forward to newspapers’ demise, and would rather they just did a better job, as noted above — but when you go out of your way to make enemies, which the press has done, those enemies will tend to celebrate your decline.