Three weeks before the Arizona Daily Star laid off 11 newsroom employees on Dec. 5, citing "slumping advertising sales and the real estate downturn," the newspaper’s parent company announced it would raise its quarterly dividend by 5.6 percent on Jan. 2.

Even if the five severed employees I worked with at the Star in the 1980s own some Lee Enterprises stock, they won’t come out ahead. The other six victims of the pre-Christmas purge won’t either.

You probably don’t know these folks, some of whom had been there for 30 years or more. They were copy editors, news assistants, illustrators, computer experts, clerks and interns – the unsung people who keep lists and events calendars accurate, catch mistakes before they’re printed and do research for the writers whose names you do know.

Maybe it wasn’t coincidental the Star ran eight corrections last Tuesday and then had to re-correct three of them the next day.

"The reason for the staff reductions is, we need to reduce costs," Publisher and Editor John Humenik explained in a Dec. 6 Star story. "Advertisers are advertising less because their sales are down."

But the Sunday Star published four days later had five pounds or so of ad supplements, plus advertising on regular news pages. It was perhaps the biggest edition of the year.

Mike Chihak, editor and publisher of the Tucson Citizen, reacted to the Star layoffs by writing that his paper wouldn’t follow suit. Since the Citizen hadn’t replaced many people who left this year, he doesn’t have to.

Officials at Lee headquarters in Davenport, Iowa, and the McLean, Va., offices of the Gannett Co., which owns the Citizen, are worried about shareholders’ reactions to falling stock prices.

Lee shares hit a yearly high of $35.65 back on Feb. 16, but they’ve slipped since, closing Dec. 12 at $15.25. Gannett stock closed the same day at $35.40 a share, down from its yearly high of $63.50 on Feb. 22.

But neither company is losing money. They’re just not making as much profit as projected. In hopes of boosting stock prices, Lee’s quarterly dividend will go from 18 cents to 19 cents next month. Gannett raised its quarterly payout from 31 cents to 40 in October.

The Star’s daily paid circulation is now about 101,000, down 4,000 from what it was last year. Sunday sales have slipped to about 152,000, down 5,000 from a year ago.

The Citizen’s official total circulation dropped to about 23,000 in the past year, down 3,000 from 2006 and about half the paper’s circulation when I went to work for it in 1960 and Tucson was one-fifth its current size. Television and other factors have not been kind to afternoon newspapers anywhere.

The 6.25 percent cut in the Star’s 176-person staff is not as large as cuts in some other Tucson businesses in recent years. But in many ways, the big daily newspapers are unofficial public utilities.

We want them to be good, timely, accurate, reliable and involved in helping us determine what’s best for Greater Tucson and its citizens.

When out-of-state owners cut our newspapers to woo out-of-state shareholders, we wonder whether our "reading and information utilities" are as concerned about us as they should be.

Admittedly, Humenik and Chihak have tough jobs balancing their bosses’ goals with community needs. But their predecessors did it when the Star and Citizen were locally owned.

I’ve worked for both dailies, been promoted and demoted by both, and competed with them for advertising as co-owner of weeklies in Green Valley and Nogales. My dad was a newspaper editor, and my daughter was, too.

With that experience, I think it’s reasonable for Tucsonans to expect the Star and Citizen to continue contributing to community goals while they satisfy their owners’ demands ... even if it occasionally means slightly lower profits.