The Los Angeles Times prints the most coherent analysis I’ve read about what’s transpiring in journalism in 2009, when CNN’s prime-time broadcast finishes third for the first time behind Fox and MSNBC among the desirable 25-to-54 viewership demographic for advertisers.

A casual observer might surmise such numbers indicate audiences divided along ideological lines. Fox flaps its right wing with Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. MSNBC styles itself the progressive alternative with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews.

And CNN steers dispassionately down the middle to lower ratings.

Timothy Rutten sorts the wheat from the chaff as only a newspaper can and presents these noisy cable news operations in some perspective.

Yes, Fox’s average prime-time audience grew 10 percent this year – to 699,000.

MSNBC averaged 307,000 viewers; CNN, 299,000.

Over any given 24-hour period, average audiences were: Fox, 320,000 (340,949 read the Denver Post); CNN, 185,000; and MSNBC, 149,000.

These are boutiques compared to the bastions of print journalism, paced by the Wall Street Journal (2,024,269), USA Today (1,900,116) and the New York Times (927,851).

Fox stacks up nicely with the L.A. Times, No. 4 at 657467, which has larger circulation than The Washington Post (582,844), Chicago Tribune (465,892), Chicago Sun-Times (275,641), Detroit Free Press (269,729) or The Plain Dealer in Cleveland (271,180).

CNN’s 185,000 is comparable to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

MSNBC’s 149,000 equates to the 57th-largest paper, The Oklahoman in Oklahoma City.

Most of us pale in comparison to Hillsdale College’s “Imprimis,” which claims more than 1.8 million readers monthly.

Imprimis is where I learn I could cruise from Rome to London June 2-14, 2010, with Stephen Hayes, senior writer for The Weekly Standard.

Rutten writes, “These numbers suggest the cable networks attract a relatively small national audience of what might be called ‘new junkies,’ who follow events throughout the day and are more likely to be strongly partisan than other Americans.

“By the time evening rolls around, they’re hungry for analysis rather than recycled reportage, and like most Americans today, they prefer interpretation that reinforces their own opinions.”

The significance of this preference is further skewed by most people who write about the media also qualifying as news junkies.

As a journalist, I feel obligated to watch all three.

Though they would certainly try to imply otherwise with their incessant self-promotion – whenever Wolf Blitzer utters the worn-out words “best political team on television,” I click to another channel out of sheer spite – these gaudy sets with their glitzy graphics mirror the audiences of conventional print and broadcast news operations.

They’re old, too, for one.

The average Fox watcher is 64.

Will you still need them? Will you still feed them now that they’re the oldest age the Beatles could imagine when they were in their 20s?

CNN is next-oldest with a typical viewer of 62, followed by the kids over at MSNBC, 59.
Who do I know who’s 59?

Tom Petty, who spent the past year reviewing concert recordings for a three-decade Heartbreakers “Live Anthology.”

Petty came away “surprised that (his ‘good little rock ‘n’ roll band’) were as good as we were.”

His job “makes a lot of people happy.”

Rutten makes another interesting point that the moderation strategy kicking CNN’s butt on TV pays big dividends in cyberia, where its Web site is far and away the most frequent destination. Newspapers are definitely in transition, trying to remake themselves on the fly without missing a deadline, but this idea that they are buggy whip factories is premature.

What TV pundits don’t recite repetitiously while they opine on stories in that day’s newspapers is that three out of of every four American adults – some 171 million folks – continue to read a print or online edition of a newspaper each week.

Newspaper readers also inhabit the educated, affluent sector of our society.

Eighty-four percent of American college graduates read a print newspaper in any given week.

As do 82 percent of all adults with annual household incomes of at least $100,000 and 79 percent of all adults employed in white-collar jobs.

There is, however, one alarming disconnect between, say, CNN and a major newspaper.

CNN remains confident about straight news as it expands news-gathering operations.
Self-confidence seemed to be the first casualty of the Great Recession in newspapering.
Like America trying to government spend its way out of economic doom and gloom, American newspapers continued to hemorrhage jobs.

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. papers this year shed another 40,000 jobs – the most in any year on record and twice as many as last year’s 21,000 jobs lost.

The total number of American newspaper jobs has declined over the last decade of the Uh-Ohs to 284,220 from 424,500.

The Los Angeles Times has half as many journalists as 10 years ago.

John Eby is Daily News managing editor. E-mail him at john.eby @leaderpub.com.