About this time last year, The Tennessean announced that it was killing its Saturday print edition.

“Our commitment to Nashville hasn’t wavered and it won’t,” Michael A. Anastasi, Tennessean editor and vice president, said in an article announcing the cutback. “We all know the way our community consumes news continues to evolve and, as with any business, we’ll continue to evolve to best meet those needs. … print will remain a key part of our multi-platform product mix.”

“Multi-platform product mix” sounds like a corporate PR description of the General Mills breakfast cereal lineup, but I’m old-school when it comes to journalism.

Newspaper executives these days are skilled at explaining why giving readers less of something is an improvement. Especially if they work for Gannett, the money-grubbing company that owns The Tennessean and a bunch of other papers – most of which also dropped Saturday delivery.

My wife and I both used to work for The Tennessean, back in the day when its editors and decision-makers tended to come from…Tennessee. We take a weekend subscription, which used to mean papers on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Now it means Friday and Sunday, a reduction of one-third, the math insists. I do not believe the subscription price has gone down.

I know, I know, there is a Saturday “E-edition” that mimics the look of an actual print newspaper. But that’s not the same, any more than an E-book is the same as an actual paper tome that you can work your way through page by tactile page. Visit our house and you’ll see the emphasis we place on the real thing.

And I suspect the transition away from home delivery will only get worse, because the writing is on the wall – or in this case, online.

Example: The Alabama Media Group, which publishes The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times and Mobile Press-Register, as well as The Mississippi Press, has announced it will end all print publications after Feb. 26. They were already down to only three times a week; now they’ll be replaced by the company’s “digital media brands.”

“We remain deeply committed to serving our local communities and are producing high-quality journalism and reaching more people than ever before,” said Tom Bates, the Alabama Media Group president. “At the same time, we’re adjusting to how Alabama readers want their information today, which increasingly is on a mobile device, not in a printed newspaper.”

Sound familiar?

The Alabama print-ghosting literally hits home for me because The Mississippi Press is my hometown paper. I used to deliver it as a kid, a one-summer undertaking that taught me the wisdom of avoiding a career in business.

I also worked for it early in my adult life and contributed columns to it in more recent years. It’s already the barest shell of what it used to be, and won’t improve as a digital-only publication.

In today’s online version, as I write this, the top story is 17 hours old. The page is otherwise heavily populated with reports on recent Powerball and Mega Millions drawings. “Are you the lucky winner?”

I appreciate that I come across as a dinosaur in all this, arguing for what a former newspaper colleague refers to, with enviable wit, as the “papyrus edition.” And I don’t dispute that more and more people are choosing to consume their news online, often from dubious sources that serve to confirm their particular biases.

What I dispute is that the emphasis for online delivery is resulting in a better news product. Almost without exception, newspapers are cutting staff, cutting the types of meetings that are covered, cutting the government oversight function they’re supposed to provide.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a news mix that includes lightweight offerings. My column-writing career has been largely built around doing just that. But there’s only so much heartwarming, feel-good, dining-centric “storytelling” – as today’s writing seems to be called – I can take.

And don’t even get me started on how The Tennessean and other Gannett papers have cut back on their editorial pages, largely farming out the opinion columns to people who are, essentially, corporate lobbyists. Why?

Fear of offending, and thus chasing off, readers.

Want to know what chases off readers? Giving them less and calling it more.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.