Lou Calvert, left, and Carl Heintze
"We're not dead yet," Calvert said in response to a man in the audience of less than three dozen who urged them to admit that print news was history. Jinks asked who in the audience read a print newspaper every day and nearly all hands went up, including young librarian Heidi Long. Jinks said that while there was no going back to the heyday, newspapers would still be around as long as there was a market.
Jinks quickly became my favorite of the group because he seemed the most realistic about just how dead the dead-tree newspaper industry truly is. Calvert, on the other hand, read a quote from Scott Bosley, executive director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors to the effect that "We'll continue to have newspapers in print because people appreciate the way they're organized and the tactile experience."
Larry Jinks"Instead of asking what's going to happen to newspapers," Jinks said, "I think a better question is to ask what's going to happen to journalism." He said that he's always loved journalism, and that that subject just happened to overlap with newspapers for a while. This is a smart man. He retired, by the way, in 1994, the year the World Wide Web broke big.
"I can't imagine a world without newspapers," Ed Pope said, "so, in my mind, they have to survive."
The audience was salted with print news lovers. I spoke with Toni Blackstock before the panel and she mentioned how delightfully robust the Times of London is in print at 90-some-odd pages. Dale Hill rose in defense of print news during the question-and-answer portion and said, as I heard it, that newspapers would always be around because she likes them and they've always been around. That's a little unfair to Dale, but only a little. Then Dale said, "A newspaper is a communal thing. You read it and say, 'Oh, look what they're saying about so-and-so.'"
A man in the audience told the panel that he is 52 (me, too) and that he simply can't imagine a world without newspapers. But he held up his phone and said he looks at the Mercury News these days for local news, high school sports, but "for the world--I'd rather get it on my Blackberry." He said if he wants his son to read an article, he has to e-mail it or his son won't find the time.
A lot of the notes I took from the panelists discussing who put the Mercury online (and who decided that information wants to be free), apparently a man named Bob Ingle, along with specific numbers showing the decline in revenue, readers, and editorial staff, I found (online) in a two-year-old Business Week article.
Ed Pope told a good story about Mercury News publisher Joe Ridder pushing to develop every square foot of the valley in order to grow his business. Someone asked Ridder if he was sad to see all the orchards go, and supposedly he replied, "Trees don't read newspapers."
If anyone who attended the intimate panel should happen to see this report, please note that my observations were available worldwide within two hours of the evening's conclusion. I would also point out that these experienced newsmen failed to attract anyone from the Mercury News (or perhaps I didn't recognize them). Columnist Mary Ann Cook from the Weekly Times was there, but editor Dick Sparrer and reporter Judy Peterson were not. Silicon Valley Community Newspapers Executive Editor Dale Bryant wasn't there, nor was Metro Publisher Dan Pulcrano or his editor, Eric Johnson. They apparently have nothing to learn from a combined 200 years of 20th-century newspaper experience.
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