True, but ...
There's a big difference between covering every tiny town meeting, and no coverage or condescending coverage ("where all the girls are either pregnant or look like they will soon become pregnant") of the suburbs where most of their readership lives.
A newspaper that purports to be a regional paper should cover at least the local 5-digit population bedroom communities, and not treat them as if they were a 2-digit population farming community 100 miles away. And, under no circumstances, should the paper make the kind of remark that I quoted above about any place.
Yet the big city papers seem to be determined to grab wide-area markets. If they want to play, they ought to pay.
Most of the bulk is advertising. Once you get past page 1 and 2, the majority of each page in the A section of the Seattle papers are large ads for downtown Seattle business. It goes downhill from there.
Then there are the advertising inserts. In the Sunday paper, more than 50% of the paper by weight is advertising inserts.
I once measured column inches between one of the Seattle papers and a much thinner smaller-city newspaper. The latter actually had more news text.
I go through the entire Sunday paper (minus the advertising). Of course, I just skim through the sections that I am uninterested in, but at least I see them.
It's been a long time since I last looked through the Sunday NY Times, but as I recall much of its bulk was advertising.
-- Mark --