David Ansen has accepted a buyout at Newsweek, one of more than 100 staffers at the newsweekly to do so.* Variety’s Anne Thompson has been surveying the damage:

The current harsh publishing climate has been hard on film critics. Gone from newspaper staff reviewer ranks are The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, Newsday’s John Anderson, The Village Voice’s Nathan Lee, The New York Daily News’ Jami Bernard and Jack Mathews, The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington and The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Eleanor Ringel Gillespie. Some have retired and some have been pushed out.

There’s two ways to look at this, of course; on the one hand it seems like a massive shakeout in the critical corps is going to leave a handful of top and ever-more-influential critics at some national or quasi-national outlets, and then an ever-dwindling number of nominally professional practitioners at the local venues that can afford them.

That’s bad, right? Yes and no. From the point of view of newspaper economics, at a time of massive financial contraction, it’s possible that metro dailies, particularly, don’t need film critics. They should instead invest their entertainment budgets covering the things that only they can do: Local theater, the music scenes, the local performing arts. That’s something the paper can provide that no one else can.

The quality of movie coverage in those papers has always been dicey. First of all, there aren’t enough good writers in the universe to produce decent copy for many hundreds of dailies. Even for decent ones, there’s often pressure not to be too mean about crummy but high-profile films. As for features, it get worse: There’s a tradition for, say, weekend entertainment sections, of simply taking whatever the biggest celebrity face that can plausibly be used and splashing it across the cover. For film, that might be a feature on some new film, which nine times out of ten is based on a junket at which the ostensible subject of the article was interviewed in a round-table setting. (Sometimes the actual writing is done by a stringer the paper might use occasionally out of Los Angeles.) Finally, if the paper deigned to take notice of smaller films, you might find details printed in tiny agate type buried in smudged listings.

It’s pretty sad. Why do they keep doing it? The answer to that question is interesting. The paper is basically just looking for filler to slip around the movie ads, a huge income stream for a typical daily. It’s not often commented on, but over the past five or ten years there was a big movement in dailies to split the weekend art sections in two: Friday, the day of the traditional big daily weekend art section, was given over almost entirely to films and DVDs. The rest of the weekend arts coverage was moved up to Thursday.

That gave the paper two chances to sell movie ads. At the same time, many of them were experimenting with selling folks subscriptions from Friday to Sunday. (”You obviously don’t want to get our crummy paper seven days a week; how about just three?”) The Thursday section gave them something to use to try to coax folks up to four days a week.

Now, note that very little of what I’ve been writing about has anything at all to do with readers—what they might like, or what they might find useful. (The alternative press built their own little financial empire partially out of providing readers better film coverage, both in terms of writing about films and also having comprehensive and easier-to-use listings.)

In the newsweeklies, their main job is to supply the studios with one or two film covers a year; since the concern is solely increased newsstand sales, the only consideration is the film’s blockbuster potential, and to promote cover those, folks like Ansen were trotted out to supply breathless behind-the-scenes detail and carefully not let on that the film in question was dreck.

And the punchline to all this is, of course, that for readers, for folks who just want some good writing on film, the internet is a candy store. The real problem is whether the great critics of the future—the Jonathan Rosenbaums of the next generation—will be vulnerable. Right now, it looks like the digital world will provide them many opportunities.

* The economics of Ansen’s departure don’t seem to benefit Newsweek much. He’s three years from retirement; Thompson says he’s staying on for the rest of the year, picking up two years salary, and a sweetened pension, and getting health coverage until he turns 65. If he weren’t leaving, the mag would get two more years of work out of him for the same amount of money—and not have to fatten his pension.