Paul Barrett has returned to the Wall Street Journal after only a few months after leaving the journal to manage investigative reports for Business Week.

There are rumors of yet another layoff at BW, which I believe would be the fifth in three years. I knew things were tight at the pub when they let Kathy Rebello go last year, but now they are not only cutting into the bone, but some of the bones are walking away on their own.

The cuts are in response to dropping advertising revenues. Management has been responding by cutting staff and adding "celebrity" columnists to the mix. Less information and more opinion. And the readers are responding by not reading.

Contributed articles and opinion might be a lot less costly to put into a pub, but I think we have hit a saturation point in the reading public. Readers want to know what's going on, not what pundits think. Unfortunately for the rest of us that means we're getting to the point where if we want that kind of information, we are going to have to pay for it...either to deliver it or to receive it.