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Two high-profile departures from the Tribune ranks this week reminded us that not everybody is going to make it through this transition in the news business.

Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski is a clear-headed, tough-minded journalist of considerable talent, and she will be missed. David Hiller, who was publisher of the Los Angeles Times, left less impression on the profession, though his exit foreshadows darker days ahead for staffers there. Their departures come as all the Tribune operations cut both staff and newshole to help meet debt payments amidst falling revenues.

Believe me, I know how it feels. General economic conditions remain grim, and earnings reports from newspaper companies offer scant promise of rapid revenue improvement. News companies rely heavily on advertising from retail, auto sales, real estate and employment. None are healthy right now.

This is the fire on the burning bridge – making it both hard to get across, and imperative that we do so.

There are a number of convenient scapegoats for this situation (I’m apparently one, myself), but despite that, no easy answers. The integrated, multimedia firms we still call “newspaper companies” may be the only medium still showing growth in total audience, but that hasn’t translated into sufficient revenue to pay for our expensive journalistic habits or inefficient old operating methods. The result, inevitably, is continued cuts and contractions.

Unless carefully managed, these can deteriorate into a feedback loop of frightening intensity, in which cuts cause declines ... which demand cuts ... which cause declines ...

The way out of any feedback loop, from greenhouse gases to newspaper woes, is to interrupt it. Stop the bleeding, then fix the problems. We can, and we are.

Doomsayers and anonymous commenters don’t want to acknowledge it, but newspapers remain the foundation of the most powerful news-gathering organizations in the world. We’re stretched making debt payments while revenues decline, but we’re making them. McClatchy has paid off hundreds of millions in KRI debt and is on track to meet our year-end target of about $2.1 billion.

Critics and dreamers want a silver bullet. There isn’t one. We’re going to have to work and manage our way out of this, day by grinding day. We cut expenses, painful as that may be. We’re selling non-strategic assets (newsprint companies, excess real estate). We’re engaged in partnerships both to reduce expenses -- like shared production facilities or distribution deals -- and to extend our reach, as with the Yahoo partnership and Google ad auction deals.

And there is much more yet to come. Complex systems do not lend themselves to simpleminded fixes, no matter what academics or dilettantes might argue. (They remind me of nothing so much as Nelson Algren’s observation about the dangers of literary conferences, where you will hear one-book wonders describe “the failures of Paine, the failures of Twain, the failings of Wolfe, the failings of Faulkner.” As I recall, this is from an essay in The Last Carousel). We are working as hard as possible across a bewildering array of fronts, learning, experimenting, testing. We're getting better.

Meanwhile, we are growing audience and online revenue. In the teeth of a brutal economic environment, we remain profitable and are investing in growth opportunities.

We have hard choices yet to make and much work yet to do, but McClatchy remains a mission-driven, public service journalism company devoted to sustaining and advancing its 151-year legacy.

Lots of people seem to want to bet against us. I’ve got a grand here that says they’re wrong. Any takers?

We need lots of new bells and whistles, databases and widgets. We also need to employ the tools we have more effectively.

Nothing in the arsenal is even nearly as potent as narrative text.

We should write better. Stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end. There should be emotional connections for readers, conclusions, a pay-off for the time readers invest.

Hey, I recognize that not every story (or even most of them) lends itself to narrative treatment. I’m all about alternate story forms, visual journalism, web 2.0 techniques, co-creation and all the rest.

But I am also hungry for storytelling, for writers who can work their magic on a preliminary hearing in a murder trial, or a heated exchange at the city council, or a lonely immigrant worker who misses home. Edna Buchanan, Jimmy Breslin, Francis X. Clines.

No six-year old will ever tug at your sleeve and ask, “Mommy, tell me an article.”

But stories? Oh yes, please.

We need more.

(I will start a new folder called "Better writing" on McClatchyNext where you can share winning examples from your paper or website. Please do.)

P.S. Yes, I also see the notice about upgrading the site at McClatchyNext. I have inquired with PBwiki about doing so; I am honestly not just stiffing them on the bill.

Several of your cousins are at the Knight Digital Media Center in L.A. this week for workshops entitled “Transforming News Organizations for the Digital Now.’’ The program looks rich and deep.

And you can follow alongwith the proceedings via Michele McLellan's blog on the event. Tune in when you can.

For those newspaper advertising and business readers who stop by here – and for all the rest of us, who depend on them – here's an intriguing lesson about the power of "free."

From a site with the intimidating name "Neuromarketing" comes this summary of recent scientific research about how powerful the concept of "free" is when it comes to making decisions. Some argue that "the preference for free" seems hard-wired into our brains. In one experiment, most subjects chose a free Hershey's Kiss over a premium European chocolate truffle priced at 14 cents ...

I know editors who have been begging for a free classified product to help sustain readership at their papers. We've agreed at our I-20 meetings in Sacramento that free classifieds are clearly worht trying, but few folks have made much of an effort yet that I know of.

Am I wrong? I'd love to hear more. In the meantime, have a look at this research, and think about what it could mean in all areas of our marketing efforts.

You may have read that a News & Observer reader sued the paper following newshole cuts and staff reductions, claiming he wasn't getting what he originally paid for.

Impossible to imagine a better response than this from the news boss:

John Drescher, executive editor of The News & Observer, said he's glad that Hempstead is a loyal reader and that the N&O has meant so much to him.

"We've had some really good papers recently, and they're worth more than the 36 cents a day that Mr. Hempstead is paying us," Drescher said.

"In fact, he owes me money," Drescher continued. "So when he gets a lawyer, he can work with my lawyer and figure out how much he's going to pay me for the excellent coverage he's been getting recently."

If you've been trying to access our new wiki today, you may have had problems. Here's the latest from their site:

PBwiki status update
Author: Ramit Sethi Filed under: General
Tuesday Jul 8,2008
7/8/08, 3:55pm: If you’ve noticed your wiki is sluggish or inaccessible, we’re aware of the problem: Our upstream network provider is having connectivity issues, and we are monitoring the situation to restore access to your wiki ASAP. Your data is safe, and we’ll update this blog post as soon as possible.
PBwiki blog for status reports in available here.

When Janis Heaphy was publisher of the Sacramento Bee and my boss, she gave me an article by Peter Drucker called "Managing Oneself." Though much of the insight later seemed like simple common sense (doesn't it usually?), at the time it opened my eyes to a couple of important concepts.

(To me, the big take-away from that article was just this: try to arrange your responsibilities so that you do most what you do best. You're better off amplifying your strengths than improving your weaknesses, all things being equal.)

The basic premise in this article from the New York Times feels the same: fairly self-evident, really, but likewise profound.

Here's a taste:

“Society is obsessed with the idea of talent and genius and people who are ‘naturals’ with innate ability,” says Ms. Dweck, who is known for research that crosses the boundaries of personal, social and developmental psychology.

“People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”

In this case, nurture wins out over nature just about every time.

The strum und drang around here and on our new wiki McClatchyNext might sound to some like an unruly chorus of confusion about editorial direction at McClatchy. It doesn’t sound that way to me.

As I’ve said many times here and elsewhere, our newsrooms are leading the way into the new media landscape -- growing audience, mastering new techniques, exploring new relationships with audiences. Yes, we have a lot to learn and some disagreement about how to go about it, but the simple, bedrock fact is that more people are reading our work and using our information than ever before.

By the most recent measurement -- first quarter, 2008 -- McClatchy’s online audience growth is up more than 40% from the previous year, which was itself a record. We learn and quickly embrace one new tool after another – most recently, rich, deep databases filled with local information began to appear across the McClatchy network. Yes, we’ve struggled with formats and had some failed communications, but video, alerts, mobile platforms and continuous news are all the norm nowadays. Our somewhat punctuated progress in applying social networking tools to news and community cohesion is about to get much better.

You are manifestly not failing.

Everybody recognizes the challenges we face. Most immediate, at the moment, is revenue. I’ve written a great deal about that in this blog of late and don’t want to rehearse it all again, but the short version is that the shifting competitive landscape (the web, mainly) and cyclical economic downturn (especially real estate, auto sales and hiring) are reducing newspaper company revenues dramatically. We’re making much less than we counted on, so we’re forced into dramatic cost savings, like layoffs.

That hurts, and it’s doubly painful when it also comes at a time when we need to be doing more, not less, for readers and other audiences. Shrink the newsroom staff while we demand more productivity? How can that be possible?

At the same time, enormous opportunity beckons. For the first time in my life, newspaper newsrooms can compete and win on breaking news. We’ve got video capabilities, access to vast realms of electronic research, pocket-sized cellphone cameras in every pocket. We can survey audiences, update stories continuously as events dictate, post reader comments seconds after articles have appeared.

We can’t go back – and I wouldn’t if we could. I’m not willing to give up what the internet, digital cameras, laptops and smart phones mean in my life. Nobody else will, either.

Utopian or distopian? At the moment, things feel precisely like the condition social theorist Fredric Jameson described as “the postmodern sublime” – the simultaneous apprehension of dread and ecstasy. Will CareerBuilder’s trustworthiness and value-added features be able to compete with the fraud-and-freebies world of Craigslist? Will readers value verified and edited stories more than group-sourced wikinews? Can somebody figure out how to pay for the professionalism we think these tasks demand?

And will somebody discover a cure for baldness and aging before the terrorist biologist brews up a virus that eats us all? Stay tuned for the conclusion in a future episode.

[Postmodern Sublime: get the t-shirt by clicking on this image.]

In a comment last week, Jonathan said McClatchy needed to "set up an online repository for ideas, sort of like what Starbucks did when it solicited suggestions from customers. Give people a venue. Innovation will happen. It must."

Okay. I did it.

The "online repository" is a public wiki with folders and sections devoted to various issues we face. It's called McClatchyNext. Anybody can read it; to create pages/subjects and post comments, you need to be "invited" to join.

I'm easy; I'll invite anybody. There are instructions on the intro page about writing to me or my assistant for an invitation. I'd prefer people to register with real names, but it's okay if you don't. Use a webmail account as cover if you must. (The wiki is a McClatchy project, but we're always happy to have other smart people help us out). There is also an option to "Request access" on the initial login screen. When you first go to the wiki, the login is in the upper right corner and you should see this screen, on which I have circled the request button. Either an email to us or a click here should get you approved.

On the front page I wrote, "Obviously, this can’t work without community participation. I promise it will get read and considered and introduced into conversations here in the corporate suite, and I hope it will likewise energize and incubate discussions at individual newsrooms and between newsrooms, too."

We're listening. Please join in.
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UPDATE: 33 regsitered users as of 3pm. Only 673 spots left; don't delay.
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Great comments have been arriving here with increasing frequency over recent weeks. Last night two particularly good ones -- Jim Richardson (again) and Anonymous 5:26pm -- moved me to this longer reply.

(I'm now working on moving this whole conversation to a more compatible setting -- some kind of wiki/collaboration site where we can have a better organized, more accessible discussion. There are too many good ideas and too much passion here to let any go to waste. Watch this space for an announcement soon.)

In the meantime I’d like to explore Anon526's comments.

Fundamental to Anon526's observations and many other comments is the mistaken impression that The Present Troubles arise primarily from strategic or management mistakes. There's obviously no way for me to talk about this without being self-serving, but choke that back for a moment and hear me out. The fact is that while managers across many industries (including me) have screwed up plenty, that's not the primary problem.

Anon526 asks, "who set the bridge on fire?” Wrong question. Sorry to mix metaphors here, but as I often say in newsroom conversations, it's important to realize it's not raining on us, it's just raining. The economic and competitive dislocations engendered by the emergence of a networked global information exchange are transforming all media (and much of the rest of society, too). Sony, Disney, NBC, Warner, the Washington Post ... you name it. The ability to make free, perfect copies and distribute them ubiquitously changes everything. The wide dissemination of cost and pricing data empowers consumers. The elimination of barriers to entry (the cost of starting Craigslist versus starting a newspaper) bring transformative challenges to old, quasi-monopolistic industries.

These are not bad things; on balance they're good for us all, and even if they weren't it wouldn't matter. It is what it is: raining. Nobody can withstand this kind of change without changing themselves. The winners will be those who learn to work wet and then get dry.

And while everybody would agree it's good to avoid "crushing debt," as Anon526 reminds us, the definition of "crushing" has changed dramatically since McClatchy bought KRI just two years ago. The price we paid was a bargain by any historical measure, the papers we bought and kept have actually outperformed the Classic McClatchy titles since the purchase, and the debt was easily manageable with the projected, relatively conservative forecast of cash flow at that time of about $800 million for the newly configured company.

Our debt (which, btw, is declining steadily and is well on its way to meeting our year-end prediction of $2 billion), does indeed generate a lot of interest to repay, and it's harder to repay it when revenues are falling due to structural changes and new competition. Layer on the additional burden of a national advertising recession in key categories like real estate, auto sales and employment and you have ... well, what we're all facing today.

You can certainly argue that McClatchy would be less in today's headlines as the smaller, less indebted company it was before the KRI purchase. Yet in many ways, our competitive and prospective position could well be worse: with only the Classic McClatchy papers in our portfolio, California would have represented a far greater percentage of our total company, and thus the real estate downturn would have hit us even harder. Add in Minneapolis and our revenue problems would have been profound.

We also would have lacked the internet clout we acquired: a sizable stake in Career Builder and a much larger share in Classified Ventures, primarily. These are high-performing, high value assets that will play a central role in our future. The national economic troubles have masked their performance and contribution, but economic downturns don't last forever.

I realize journalism isn't the central point of your comments, 526, but let me not leave this unsaid: we're a much stronger news enterprise as a result of merging two great journalism operations. Even under the strain of today's finances, we're winning Pulitzers, exposing national and international scandals, policing local governments and serving community interests from Anchorage to Miami.

Today's McClatchy is more diversified geographically and economically and stronger on the internet. Our total audience is growing. Our journalism is strong and mission-centered.

We have challenges, but we will overcome them. I agree with you that not every newspaper company will get across the bridge. But as I offered here before, if anybody wants to put his money where his mouth is and bet against McClatchy, I'm easy to find.

The McClatchy Washington bureau series Guantanamo: Beyond the Law, was a fine example of the kind of public service journalism that generally comes only from established, mainstream media organizations with professional staff and the willingness to invest time in their efforts.

Here's another powerful example, this one the result of a year-long examination of working poor families in the Fort Worth region, presented by the Star Telegram. Click on the image below to visit a multimedia presentation of findings; there's also an introductory video on the McClatchy national site, here.

Early in my editing career, I often moved too slowly in making hard decisions. Sometimes I simply didn’t know what to do, of course, but mostly it was a case of fearing the disorientation or disruption of enforcing an unpopular decision would negate the benefits of the move. I left people too long in jobs I knew they should have vacated. Too often, my decisions were overly influenced by staff opinion, and not the readers’ interests.

I got better as I matured in the job, and though it’s been some years now since I directed a staff, I know it’s harder today. Editors must move faster and act more decisively than ever.

Time is not our friend. Mark Zieman in Kansas City introduced me to the poem Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day, which includes the memorable couplet, “Time is the school in which we learn/ Time is the fire in which we burn.” (I think Mark probably heard it on Star Trek, but maybe he was an English major.)

That works well with some advice I offered a young editor at a non-McClatchy paper in an email exchange earlier today. Maybe I got a little wound up in my argument, but I closed by writing, “My current metaphor for our business is this: We have to move, and we can see a secure spot for ourselves right across the river. The good news is, there's a bridge; the bad news is, it's on fire. There's time to get across, but not to [screw] around. I intend to get to the other side before the bridge burns up. Who's coming with me?

The drumbeat of of depressing news about newspaper layoffs and other cutbacks grows louder by the day. Just this week we learned about about a huge cutback at the Palm Beach Post and a 25% reduction of staff and newshole at the Hartford Courant. (Since the Courant had recently been highlighted as an example of good productivity by some TRB executives, other Tribune papers are now fearing their cuts may be bigger than in Hartford.)

The crisis in our business today is about revenue, not journalism. We’re not doing everything right on our side of the house, but the fact is that total audience – newspapers plus unduplicated digital reach– is growing. More people want what we do today than ever before.

But cash flow – the fuel that keeps our engines running – has fallen by hundreds of millions of dollars. I’ll say that again: hundreds of millions of dollars. (Anybody who thinks our layoffs and other expense controls are occasioned by corporate fat cats staying in $200 hotel rooms is dangerously delusional. That might be stupid, but it’s not the problem).

Neither is it a question of profit margins. “If the company wouldn’t try to maintain historically exorbitant margins, we’d have plenty of money,” newsroom critics maintain. But margins are a derivative of performance, not an objective. If you invest a dime and get back 15 cents, your profit margin is 33% [corrected, thanks KA]– but you still can’t pay back the quarter you owe me. You can’t spend margins; you spend cash flow, and that is what’s declining at alarming rates throughout the industry, partly as a result of new competition from the internet and partly due to specific (presumably temporary) downturns like California and Florida real estate.

If you and your spouse make $100,000 a year and one gets cut back to half-time, you’d only have $75,000. You wouldn’t starve, and you could probably make the mortgage payment, but you’d sure take cheaper vacations and eat out less often. You’d also start looking hard for ways to make more money.

That’s where we are as a company today. We are working hard to increase revenue, though we’re sailing into a headwind blown up by the collapse of real estate prices, auto sales and hiring. We’re filling all sales jobs, retraining sales people to sell online products better and changing commission structures to reward growth there. Our Yahoo partnership, now in its earliest phases at a few papers, promises to bring significant improvement as we deploy demographic and behavioral targeting to online sales.

In the meantime, we are controlling expenses, because we must – and that includes painful cuts in newsrooms, the heart of our public service mission.

This is doubly painful because we’re demanding more of you at the same time – once again, because we must. The bridge is on fire, and we have to keep moving across it. Some of what we’re carrying will need to be tossed aside to speed the crossing, because failure to reach the other side is fatal.

This “crossing” is our conversion from a once-a-day printed paper to an integrated, 24/7 multimedia company. We are well launched on that journey, and successfully so. Even as things get harder, we’re moving forward.

It will require bold moves to keep moving across ahead of the fire. Raleigh and Charlotte are pioneering an intimacy of shared news and effort we’ve never tried before. Others will follow. We’re contracting outside printing for some papers in the Northwest, and may be looking to do so elsewhere. The Miami Herald delivers the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in Dade County (and visa versa); we may well see far more along those lines.

I mention these specifics (and foreshadow more to come) to make the point as forcefully as possible that our talk of reinvention is not a simple smokescreen or mere bravado. When it’s accomplished, we’ll be a smaller, more sophisticated company, honed and optimized to perform our core mission, highly efficient in production operations and aggressively skilled in selling an integrated media package nobody else can offer. The staffers who make the crossing will understand (and help create) a new relationship with audiences, with competitors, with partners.

That is the destination across the burning bridge.

Most professional reaction to the McClatchy Washington Bureau's investigation into Guantanamo: Beyond the Law has been overwhelmingly positive. The biggest criticism I saw was from the Boston Phoenix, which argued that other mainstream media weren't paying enough attention to it.

Reader reaction has been more varied. Most of them were likewise supportive and positive, but John Walcott tells me some only wanted to debate whether we should be waterboarded before we were all executed for treason.

Macon Telegraph Editorial Page Editor Charles Richardson heard from a lot of them in his Georgia, military community, and offered them a splendid answer. It's not online anymore, so I am posting the whole piece here:

Why we do what we do

The McClatchy Newspapers' series "Guantanamo: Beyond the Law" published in this newspaper Sunday through Thursday, has elicited a number of comments. Several readers have called the paper unpatriotic. One said the series "Totally undermines our nation." Another said the report was "totally biased" and suggested this newspaper "take a lesson from FOXNews and start publishing the good news about our country and our military rather than constantly trying to destroy our vital institutions." One, reader even said we were guilty of treason.

We are afraid some of our readers have a stilted view of our constitutional duty. But first a little history. Our country was founded as a nation of laws. Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 27 were lawyers, five were informal judges educated at the world's most renowned institutions, including Cambridge and Harvard.

When the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia in June 1776, the colonies were already at war with Britain. On July 4, 232 years ago, members of the Continental Congress unanimously approved the Declaration of Independence. In the historic document's second paragraph, the authors wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, - that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

It is difficult to think of our government as not wearing the white hats; the world has depended on America to come to its rescue time after time. Brave American men and women have given their blood, sweat and tears to liberate people throughout the world. However, there are times we don't live up to the principles our founders set forth. And those principles are not conditional on whether or not we are at war.

War is indeed hell and the atrocities of war are numerous. However, what has set our armies apart from the brutal dictators, puppets and henchmen is our rule of law. One of the cases where we have not followed our own high standards is in the treatment of people we suspect are terrorists. The newspaper series pointed out that in many cases we've been wrong. We have tortured and abused prisoners without evidence of their guilt. The real crime is that those abuses were products of a system endorsed at the highest levels of our government and military. It was designed to rob the suspects of what Americans regard as basic legal rights. Proponents of the bogus system are quick to say, "They are not Americans," but our own Declaration of Independence states: "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The system invented by the Bush administration to deal with suspects has been shot down by the Supreme Court three times. We have watched this administration fabricate stories for its own benefit and play the propaganda game for the sake of the war effort.

Should the American press emulate the history of the former Soviet Union's Information Telegraph Agency of Russia, better known as TASS? Should the American press become the propaganda arm of the government such as "The Attack" newspaper in Nazi Germany, set up by the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels? Is that what our founders had in mind?

If so, they made a mistakeof including the press in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."Jefferson also wrote, three years before his death in 1826, "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure."

That is our duty. That is our constitutional charge. Yes, our work, in Jefferson's words creates, "agitation," but that turbulence is necessary if our republic is to survive as a free nation with liberty and justice for all.

Interesting post from Dave Pell here, with some advice for Yahoo. Here's a taste:

Search is, for better or worse, your me too feature. You’ve got a damn exclamation point in your logo. Let Google keep the question mark. That battle is over. Don’t bring chains to a fight if you’re better with knives. Bring extra knives. News, entertainment and information is what you’re great at. You’re old enough to know that.

I'm in the Washington bureau, due back in the office in Sacramento Thursday.

Does anybody at McClatchy do a big picture blog like the one referenced in the post below? The idea seems to me like a can't-miss reader favorite. If you're doing it, could you let me know via email?

Simple. Brilliant. Irresistible.

Those are some of the ways admirers describe The Big Picture, a new photo weblog at boston.com that I think should become a staple of every news website as quickly as possible. It's by far the best online use of the power of documentary photojournalism I have seen.

Have a look at this interview with creator Alan Taylor for some more insight into this deceptively simple but potent idea.

In my Tuesday post I recalled a time when a Sac Bee ombudsman criticized the paper for its coverage of wildfires in Southern California. I didn't say so in the post, but while speaking in the Bee newsroom a few days later, I attributed that criticism to the current public editor, Armando Acuna.
That was wrong. The incident I referred to occurred in November 2003 and involved Armando's predecessor, Tony Marcano. I was also off a bit about his point; he was mainly critical of the speed with which the Bee responded, not the number of reporters, and he alleged the paper had "meager resources" for such coverage.
So much for memory. I'm sorry.

There’s much to admire in the passion and commitment displayed by comments posted here and elsewhere by journalists worried about their jobs, their profession and even their country. But there is much to fear in how retrograde it feels.

I yield to no one on dedication to first principles of journalism, my affection for the newspaper business or the thoroughness of my inculcation in it. I can get as misty-eyed as anyone at tales of city rooms past or newsroom characters fondly recalled or old watering holes warmly remembered; if I was still drinking, I imagine I’d be doing a fair amount of that right now.

All of us put out the best newspaper we knew how to 15 years ago (and some of us were doing it 30 years ago, too), but even if we were as good as we’d like to remember, that won’t work today. I’m not trying to trash our history or legacy here, friends; I’m trying to make sure everybody is awake. We must celebrate our roots, but our future is not well served by roseate memories. Our profession demands and deserves more of us.

I started getting the Sacramento Bee on my doorstep 12 years ago. Yes, there were star players and stunning projects – but it was not, day in and day out, a better paper than I get today. There, I said it. Add the Bee’s online presence nowadays and it’s not even close. The Anchorage Daily News I edited had much more staff and a larger newshole than now – yet its reach and influence have never been greater than today.

Many of your comments seem to reference Sacramento memories. Here are a couple of mine.

I got here after Pete Dexter (damn it) but by the time I started reading, there was nowhere near enough sharp commentary, fine writing or great storytelling in the paper. Though the Bee was indeed all over the social services beat, my wife once noted that California must have the cleanest state government in the country, since she hadn’t seen a single scandal in the paper in two years. I recall that while some readers in our survey said the Bee reminded them of Tom Hanks (a Cal State Sacramento graduate), even more picked “Grumpy Old Men” as the movie surrogate for their morning paper.

Does this seem harsh? That's not my intention, of course. I’m picking on the Bee because it’s my hometown newspaper and I’ve read it every day for many years. I’m ignoring much fine, prize-winning work and highlighting these tough examples to make a point: to whatever degree your argument is “All we need is to get back to the kind of (beat reporting) (community coverage) (bigger sports section) (whatever) ...” you’re wrong.

Of course we have to cover the state senate (and btw, Jim, Andy Furillo says he sees you there and can’t figure why you don’t see him). But if all we do is fill the paper with the kind of incremental process stories that routinely appeared 10 or 15 years ago, we’ll lose. One of you even expressed fond memories of days when Bee reporters “covered local civic associations.” Oh, please.

Memory highlights folks like Dexter or Deb Blum – and how I wish we had them both, and many others like them, on staff still. But does your memory encompass the whole of those old newsrooms? Please, go to the microfilm and read a week or a month’s worth of papers 15 years ago.

Here’s the good news: a great deal of what Jim and the Anonymice have to say is exactly what we need to hear: get out of the office; listen to the community (even if we sometimes call it “audience” these days); eliminate layers of editors and operate with less hierarchy ; tell unique stories that matter in readers’ lives; work with confidence and swagger; don’t panic.

And you know what? We also have to feed the web 24/7, learn to tell video stories, engage with readers online (thank you, Marcos), create attractive blogs with rich personalities, be flexible and forgiving when editors make bad decisions in new circumstances, speak up when the boss is wrong, and abandon our excuses.

Anything less is surrender, no matter how much nostalgia you wrap it up in.

I share this not because it has anything to do with newspapers or journalism, but because it's just to interesting to pass up:

I had to park my car at [Seattle's] SeaTac on Saturday-Sunday and this sparked a small epiphany. It now costs more to park a car at one airport than to rent one at the other end. To my twisted mind, this indicates that machines (taking the automobile as a benchmark) are now self-reproducing so fast we have reached a transition point where machines are cheaper than the empty space they fill. (George Dyson, via Kevin Kelly)