The newspaper industry is calling May 2 “Black Monday.” Editor & Publisher crunched the latest circulation numbers, and hoo-boy, are they bad.

How bad, do you ask? The Baltimore Sun’s circulation dropped 11.5 percent in daily circulation and 8.4 percent in Sunday circulation. In one year, the paper lost 10 percent of its readers.

As for other big losers, the Chicago Tribune was down 6.6 percent daily (as was the Rocky Mountain News) and 4.6 percent Sunday. The Denver Post lost 6.3 percent for daily circ. The Los Angeles Times dropped 6.4 percent daily and 7.9 percent on Sunday. The Cleveleand Plain Dealer lost 5.2 percent daily, and the San Francisco Chronicle slid by 6 percent daily and 7.7 percent on Sundays.

Nationwide the hurt was still significant. The Miami Herald was down 3.7 percent daily and 3.9 percent Sunday. The Houston Chronicle slipped by 3.9 percent daily, and the Washington Post was down 2.6 percent for daily and 2.4 percent for Sunday.

Some newspapers actually posted gains, which you can read about here.

Now comes the fun part, namely the media’s self-flagellation about why this is happening and what can be done to fix it. Even more fun (or frustrating) is watching the media fail to address one of the main culprits.

Read these explanations that ran in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere. Sure, there’s the hand-wringing about America’s youth not reading newspapers, the Do Not Call list, and of course the Internet, not to mention several large newspapers getting caught inflating their circulation numbers.

But of course, no one seems to understand that the media’s lack of ideological diversity seems to be center to this slide. The closest thing to an epiphany I’ve seen comes from a quote in the Times:

“There’s a collision of factors,” said John Kimball, chief marketing officer for the newspaper association. “Newspapers are in the marketplace of ideas, and there are a lot more options than there were 10 or 15 years ago.”

Let’s look at this in perspective. This is not the first time that newspapers have been threatened by new technology. The demise of the American newspaper has been foreseen in the years after the Marconi wireless radio, television, then 24-hour cable news. Yet newspapers are still here.

Is it coincidence that this big slump comes in the wake of an election year that gave us the media’s ignoring of the Swift Boat Vets until the Internet shamed the MSM into covering it, Bombgate, Memogate and Easongate? When a number of news blogs dedicated to exposing media bias and errors have popped up?

I don’t think so, and neither does Paul at Powerline, who says it the best, as usual:

It seems pretty clear to me that you don’t lose 5 percent or more of your readers in a year because young people like the internet. You lose 5 percent or more of your readers in a year because you’ve alienated lots of readers. That certainly explains why I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post in 2004. Indeed, I wonder whether the Editor and Publisher numbers have more than a little to do with the 2004 election. If so, newspapers have two options — hope that future elections are cancelled or try to become less biased.

So here’s where you come in. Have you ever canceled a subscription based on the quality of the product? If so, why? Share it here, and be honest — if you dropped your local paper because it dropped “Garfield,” say it loud and proud.

Also, be nice. Let’s remember that I work for a newspaper (a decent one, if I do say so myself), and neither I nor my co-workers are the Antichrist.