phxated_wymanRichard Nilsen, the paper’s fine fine-arts critic, had a review of The Barber of Seville on the front page of the Living section today.

It was a rave:

[A]s Arizona Opera’s “Barber” began, the audience was prepared to hear a perfectly adequate performance. We awaited our favorite arias and, for about five minutes or so, everything went pro forma.

Then Figaro entered the scene, with his “Largo et factotum,” and it was as if someone plugged it into 220 volts. From that moment on, this became one of the best “Barbers” ever.

But the review said he’d seen the opera Friday. The show ran Saturday and Sunday as well; PHXated saw it Sunday afternoon and there were empty seats. Wouldn’t it be better to get the thing into the paper earlier?

It took some digging, but we found Nilson’s Nilsen’s review posted online Saturday afternoon. (In weird but typically Republic fashion, it was reposted with the rest of the paper at midnight last night as well.)

The problem, we suspect, is that the paper’s Saturday deadlines are too early to accomodate a review of a Friday night performance.

What about Sunday? Well, you may find this hard to believe, but it may be true that the Republic, like many papers, has Sunday deadlines too early for a Friday evening review.

(None of these decisions, you will note, are done for the benefit of readers. They are done to make the printing schedule more convenient for the paper, and by “the printing schedule more convenient” I mean “the whole process cheaper.”)

Anyway, so why didn’t it get printed Monday?

Well the answer to that question is tougher. The section had a very important wire story from the Washington Post to run. It was about how some churches have to “meld cultures” (i.e., with, say, English and Spanish speakers).

Obviously pressing news.

It also had another very important wire story about how American Idol’s ratings are falling. (That was one was from the Post as well.)

Oh yeah, and yet one more wire story, this one from USA Today, about the lessons of the swine flu—which, you will remember, wasn’t really called swine flu, but rather the H1N1 virus, but whatever.

The paper also on Monday had to make room on the front page of its living section for a blurb about saving “40 percent at Basha’s on Shamrock Farms products,” and no, that wasn’t an advertisement, though it sure reads like one.

But wait—why couldn’t the paper run Nilsen’s review inside the section on Monday?

Well, because it had to run a story about fancy doghouses.

This carried the hedline “Posh pads for pampered pooches.”

Presumably because the alternative, “Delightful digs for discriminating doggies,” didn’t fit.

(By the way, you can see here that the “pampered pooches” phrase is an alliterative well the paper has come back to at least five times this year alone.

(Note that this story joins the paper’s recent investigative reports about dogs on Twitter and dogs on Facebook.)

The pampered pooches story was a wire story as well, of course.

Anyway, the moral to this story is the moral to all the others. Newspapers are dying because they don’t care about readers, and they don’t care about their community. If they did, they would lift a finger to get a rave review of one of the city’s premiere arts organizations by one of the paper’s more serious writers into the paper sooner than four days later.