Neither newsroom staff spends the time it should on the ground in our city's neighborhoods. If editors at the Inky or Daily News want to stop the bleeding of readership, they need to get back in touch with the hearts and minds of the lost readers. The easiest and smartest way to do that is to put reporters on the streets.

Give the Daily News credit for maintaining its Urban Warrior column. But there's no excuse for the Inquirer lounging around and ignoring everyday people. Yes, the Inquirer has seen its newsroom staff sliced and diced, but it still has about two dozen reporters on its city desk.

Inquirer editor Amanda Bennett should be a smart enough manager to find five or six reporters to put on the street daily, to listen to the struggles and successes of our citizens. The Inky actually made two recent forays into the streets. Editors dispatched a reporter to ask folks in North Philly and East Falls how they thought Donald Trump's casino proposal would change their neighborhoods. But the story was scooped by amateur journalist Ed Goppelt, who posted a story and photos on his watchdog Web site, Hallwatch.org, weeks earlier.

Three-quarters of the Inky's own readers told researchers last year that they counted on the paper for their local news. That dovetails with an earlier extensive national survey sponsored by two newspaper trade groups, who spent two years interviewing 37,000 readers. They discovered that the content that most influenced people to buy a paper was reporting that was intensely local, that focused more on people's everyday lives, that explained "how we are governed" and provided depth and interpretation. If the Inky isn't giving it to the suburbanites, they should give it to the city dwellers.

If the Inky and Daily News cared about life on the streets, they might hear people asking why so many 911 calls go unanswered, and how they can get the cops' attention to chronic neighborhood nuisances. They might hear people wondering why graffiti is again becoming an eyesore. Instead, we mostly get pronouncements from pols and local special interests rich or clever enough to garner limited media attention.

Until the early 1990s the Inky had more than a dozen staffers covering Northeast Philly, and the Daily News had four reporters assigned to city neighborhoods in the early 1990s. But neither newsroom, pressed by the Freddy Kruegers of corporate accounting, stuck with those ventures. Legendary Daily News editor Zack Stalberg had forsaken people-based reporting by 1996 in favor of a softer-news approach to attract women readers, a disaster that accelerated readers' indifference for the "People Paper."

With over 415 people still at her disposal, Bennett still has the chance to fill in the doughnut hole in the city's coverage and better connect with its 1.4 million inhabitants. She can cut the columns of three local journalists who, while professional and competent, add little to our civic life. Gail Shister's coverage of the broadcast world, Dick Polman's writings about national politics and Andrew Cassel's ruminations on economics mostly duplicate reportage in other news outlets. They should not be draining precious Inky resources. Bennett could then bump some younger, hungry reporters onto the streets, to reconnect with community activists, neighborhood businesspeople and street cops. Bennett should also mull whether the money spent for Trudy Rubin's commentaries on foreign affairs might be better spent embedding another yet reporter in the streets of Philadelphia. City readers would be more interested in coverage closer to home than in the contrived "Carnal Knowledge" sex column by staffer Faye Flam.

The Daily News, with only 100 people left to report, write, edit, design and illustrate the tab six days a week, has become the journalistic equivalent of Ashley Olsen. But editor Mike Days could beef up the Urban Warrior column by having general assignment reporters such as Tom Schmidt help City Hall reporter Chris Brennan carry the load.

If the editors give a damn about what people have to say in the 'hoods, those same people might give a damn about what our two city dailies are publishing, and start buying the papers again.

Kevin Haney is a former Daily News staff writer.