By Peter Galuszka

The incredible, shrinking Richmond Times-Dispatch offers a lot less to read these days. Under  the leadership of Publisher Thomas A. Silvestri, many staffers have been fired to boost parent firm Media General’s top line. The effort hasn’t been entirely successful since its stock, once around $65 a share, is now a little better than $4 a share, admittedly better than the near buck a share low of a couple of years back that brought MEG close to delisting on the Big Board.

So, the TD tries to get around its dearth of real reporting by getting Richmond’s pooh-bahs to write tomes in the “Commentary” section about what a great job they are doing. These, coupled with Silvestri’s unfailingly sunny and typically mindless columns boosting the Confederate Capital, make for a more amusing section on Sunday mornings than the funny pages.

This Sunday’s section was kicked off by Eugene Trani, the fireball, former president of Virginia Commonwealth University. Trani is famous for growing VCU from a Tier Two commuter college to something aspiring to greatness. He bulldozed block after block of Richmond’s downtown to expand the university and make it more of an economic driver.

Now retired, Trani heads Richmond’s Future, which the TD describes as a “forward looking regional think tank.” That, in itself is an interesting choice of words. If it were “backward looking,” we’d be in more of a heap of trouble than we already are.

After a couple of years of heading Richmond’s Future, Trani has used the group’s mostly corporate funding to finance studies by a Federal Reserve economist and a VCU assistant professor. Together, these reports try to rate the Richmond SMSA, which Trani meticulously explains to the dullards among us, against 10 other SMSA around the country to see where it stands. Good and bad, it turns out. Second in per capita income and sixth in annual employment growth  compared to places such as Jacksonville, Fla. and Salt Lake City.

Writing in the TD, Trani claims  that it is important to know where Richmond  stands against other similarly-sized city. I looked thoroughly through his article to find more of a “so what” but couldn’t find it.

And that is the problem. Richmond’s business elite has been staring at its navel for a long time. There has been study after study trying to “benchmark” the city. Consultant James A. Crupi, who does a lot of thumbsuckers for the Fortune 100, did a study in 1993 that found that Richmond is a “glass half-empty.” He returned in 2007, funded by Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce money, to find that Richmond had somehow transformed itself into a “glass half full.”  What that means, I have no idea.

There are other groups trying to get a real bullseye on Richmond. There’s something called the Capital Region Collaborative that promotes navel-gazing on a regional basis. Its ranks are fed from something called “Leadership Metro Richmond” which trains “leaders” to be big shots among the corporate salons and, of course, participate in and cheerlead Crupi and Trani style reports.

OK, fine. But so what? Trani says Richmond should boost its base in logistics. No brainer, there. Greatly expanded Ft. Lee is a dominant defense supply area and Richmond has a great central-location on the Mid-Atlantic coat. Too bad its tiny seaport was so badly managed that it has all but shut down. Richmond also should boost science and math studies, like every other burg in the U.S.

And, there’s something called the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing, which is a multi-university and community college effort to take advantage of a new Rolls Royce plant east of Petersburg.

Small problem, there. The Rolls Royce plant was originally intended to build  parts for engines for corporate jets. The 2008 global financial meltdown, and  the bad judgment of big U.S. corporate titans to fly corporate jets to Washington to beg for Congressional bailouts, chilled that market.

Now, the big facility underway is looking for other markets. One hope had been making engines for the new F-35 joint strike fighter for the Air Force, Navy and Marines. That’s something anti-spending hawk U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, a key player in the Richmond elite, pushed mightily although the Pentagon said it had another supplier and didn’t need more engines from Rolls. In any event, it won’t matter. Reacting to Republican anti-spending fanatics, President Obama is likely to cut back on the F-35 program.

These are small details, however. The reality is that no matter how much the Tranis and Crupis look into their crystal balls, Richmond’s economy is still pretty much dominated by electric utility Dominion, packaging maker MeadWestvaco and cigarette giant Altria, whose primary products are lethal and which moved its headquarters to Richmond after being pretty much thrown out of New York City. The region was badly hurt when mass retailer Circuit City self-destructed from bad management and chip maker Qimonda went under, with thousands of jobs, because of bad local markets.

Yet another firm went under, too, during the 2008-09 recession, mortgage lender LandAmerica. Interestingly, Trani was a director of the firm and, in that capacity, is a defendant in a lawsuit that alleges that he and others failed in their fiduciary duties because they took decisions that resulted in the collapse of the firm and major losses for investors.

The Richmond newspaper, naturally, doesn’t hit that one too hard. Instead, Trani, rather than a professional journalist on staff, will be writing a series of reports about his new think tank and where he thinks Greater Richmond rates and should be going in the Greater World.