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The other day in an email to a friend I referred to "the economic tsunami that seems headed for the U.S. newspaper industry."

Is that overstated? If you recently lost your job in a newsroom cutback, you probably don't think so.

But when I was traveling last week I saw something that surprised me.

The "Boxing Day tsunami" from the 2004 Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake was a horrible thing, leading to 300,000 deaths and staggering destruction.

Many of us watched the amateur videos that were quickly posted to the Internet, some of them shot on camera phones.

We saw buildings collapsing, people pulled into the sea, and far worse.

Yet in my stay on Ko Phuket, on the Andaman sea in Thailand, I didn't see defeat. I saw life going on, undoubtedly changed but nevertheless defined by optimism and growth. I saw new construction. I saw hotels full of happy tourists and restaurants full of diners.

And on a food stand sign on Ko Phi Phi I ran across a sign: "Thank you to the tsunami that enabled me to have this shop today."

It was a powerful reminder that in any great change, even one as horrible as the 2004 tsunami, there are going to be winners.

Which we be? That is likely to turn on how we respond. We can sit and bemoan the passing of the era of the great metropolitan newspaper or we can choose to look for ways to invent the future. I think journalism will be changed, but it's going to survive.

Core newspaper readers?

One day I was doing some consulting and sat down with a new media director to talk about how he might work to make his website more complimentary and less directly competitive with his newspaper.

Develop the interactive community, I said.

But that takes time and people that I don't have, he said.

Stop putting all your time into cutting and pasting newspaper stories onto the web, I said. Your limits are real, but you can reallocate. Make your website an interactive center of the community. Lead discussions instead of trying to duplicate the newspaper. Let print be best at what it does, and use the Internet for its interactive strengths.

But my news guy won't like it, he said. The news guy signed up to put news stories online, not run bulletin boards. He'll quit.

I've thought about that interaction often recently.

Across the country, there are moves to integrate online and print departments. Reporters and photographers are being asked -- finally! -- to recognize that they have multimedia responsibilities. Newsrooms are being renamed "information centers" and asked to accept responsibilities for non-news information, utility data, "evergreen" resources. And online "divisions" are disappearing.

Not surprisingly, some people don't like this. But the pushback isn't always from some mossback from the print side who's still acting like it's 1987. Sometimes it's from the online side.

Middle managers everywhere naturally resist anything that might diminish their power bases. It shouldn't be surprising that onliners, too, can become agents of stasis rather than agents of change. We need to be on guard against that.

Not all change is good, and it's appropriate to speak out, to raise issues that need attention. But we need to make sure that we're raising issues that are real and not merely looking for ways to protect our positions of power or independence. Let's not become the new roadblock.

I was on the road all last week, and I didn't live-blog a remarkable seminar in Los Angeles for two reasons. One: the usual annoyingly bad hotel wifi connection in the conference rooms. Two: I didn't want to invade the privacy of the participants. In the prep work, one of the editors quipped that he was reluctant to document his vision because these days his memo would immediately wind up on Romenesko. Sometimes we need to talk privately in order to work publicly.

Ten top print editors of large newspapers were paired with their top online editors. In this era of online/offline integration, the print guys have some serious catching up to do and the online guys have a tough enough time keeping up. It's to their credit that they took four long, intense days away from the office to focus on learning about digital media. Learning requires that you drop your natural defenses and admit your shortcomings, something that's not easy to do, especially when you're supposed to be the alpha dog.

They emerged with plans to launch some new projects and change some existing plans. One major newspaper will be adding aggregation -- identifying, pointing, linking to other peoples' content -- to their political campaign coverage. That's a significant step for an institution founded on closed-circle journalism. More importantly, they emerged with thoughtful positions on why we need to move to open and conversationally engaged journalism models.

I heard a lot of excitement about widgets -- the tools (often driven by Javascript or XML interfaces) that make it possible to embed live information from external sources in Web pages. Most of that excitement was about the possibility of distribution, rather than incorporation, but I heard openness to both. This concept of live interoperation with other peoples' websites is tough to get across to many software engineers, and I was encouraged by the editors' reactions.

The best news may be what I didn't hear: defensiveness. I didn't hear a bunch of talk about protecting the old core. Or any nonsense about cannibalization.

It's easy to snipe at newspapers for "too little, too late," but I think we're actually in a cycle of irrational negativity about their prospects. There is much unharvested opportunity in local markets, and if newspapers can focus their very substantial resources in the right directions, there's a future to be found.

It's possible, of course, for all the good intentions to be forgotten when everyone gets pulled back into the crush of daily work, but the foundations have been laid.

Thanks to the Knight New Media Center for pulling this together.

When I read the Gannett "Information Center" memo and its attached Q and A, I immediately worried that there was so much in it that it would be misinterpreted and lead to unpredictable side effects. Faced with the enormity of it all, people would naturally latch onto the little parts that felt most comfortable (like hard news 24x7, or video).

I don't know whether that's the problem or if it's just a good old fashioned case of playing telephone, but it does seem that what's coming out at the bottom of the funnel is not always what was poured in the top, judging from the whinefest at SportsShooter.com.

I don't recall the memo dictating that everyone would be a generalist and no one a specialist, or that photographers would quit shooting and spend all their time editing "citizen journalism" video uploads, et cetera.

Introducing change at any organization is difficult. Gannett happens to be a top-down, central-control operation, and a top-down, central-control change memo comes naturally. Following it up is another thing entirely, and it looks like that will be a process full of bumps and surprises.

I don't happen to work for such a company (we are, by comparison, decentralized), but in conversations over the last week I was surprised to hear from several editors and publishers that a "call to action" memo would be welcomed.

There is no substitute for leadership at the top. But there's also no substitute for leadership at the other layers, too. Including among photographers.

Howard Owens has some thoughts about all this on his weblog.

The nation's second largest newspaper is in one hell of a mess, and as Jeff Jarvis says, it's become something of a parlor game to answer the question, "What would you do with ...?"

Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll quit last year in protest of budget cuts. Publisher Jeffrey Johnson defied corporate instructions to cut expenses this year, and was shown the door as his reward.

Market confidence in newspaper companies has evaporated, and with it, share prices; the Tribune Company's current $8.11 billion market capitalization is roughly what it paid to acquire Times Mirror about six years ago. Chandler family interests are revolting over the apparent decline of their inherited wealth, forcing parent Tribune Company to go through one of those hellish periods described as "exploration of alternatives for creating additional value for shareholders." These things tend to end in vivisection.

I've only been to the Los Angeles Times once. It felt like a big, dark, cavernous chunk of the past, stranded in a strange new world. My experience was very odd. I was there to speak at an IFRA Newsplex "convergence road show" sponsored in part by the Times. I had just done a similar gig at Florida Today to a fairly packed room. But in Los Angeles, no one showed up. No one. Had they already figured out the future, and decided not to talk about it any more? Martha Stone and I sat around and chatted awhile, ate some Los Angeles Times pastries, drank some Los Angeles Times coffee, then left. I looked over some museum pieces in the lobby on my way out.

Most of my impressions of the Times were formed in my decades as an editor, and especially from the LAT-WP wire. It's long been a reporter's newspaper, a place where there was plenty of space and freedom and resources to go out and do serious, long-term, long-form journalism.

Such institutions are good for society. But it seems the Los Angeles Times today is "caught between two worlds" in many dimensions. It's not a failure (it is, in fact, making tons of money) but is being flogged by the investment marketplace. It is too big to be a local newspaper, but rather seems to be a regionally distributed national newspaper, which makes no sense at all. It is an artifact of the 20th century protruding uncomfortably into the 21st.

Michael Kinsley has proposed that the Tribune Company reform its big papers into one big national edition, which at first blush strikes me as a really dumb idea (RC Cola, anyone?) but does illustrate the problem of the supermetro.

As it painfully turns the screws on the Los Angeles Times, the Tribune Company is investing in new media such as CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com, Apartments.com, HomeGain.com, ShopLocal.com, ForSaleByOwner.com and Topix.net. (Notice that none of these are news sites, unless you count Topix, which is a mere aggregator and not journalism.) And every one of its newspapers has aggressive, if conventional, Web operations, many of them growing as print-focused headcount is reduced. These seem to be sensible steps, but the market is not impressed.

The New York Times says the Los Angeles Times has assigned some of it is investigative reporters to figure out what to do. They're calling it a "Manhattan Project." I don't know exactly what instructions they were given, or what they'll actually do (often these are not the same things). In a general sense, I applaud any effort by a newsroom to critically examine the current media landscape and the relationship between reporting and audience; it certainly beats living by assumptions derived from a bygone era. But it seems likely that the effort will be all about preservation and not about creation.

So, having stated the obvious, where do I really land on this issue? What would I do with the Los Angeles Times? I sight, shake my head, and say I'm not sure. But I don't think it can sit forever between local and national. And I am reminded that the real Manhattan Project ended in blowing things up, and Oppenheimer quoting Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

John Burke has a thoughful commentary on editorsweblog.org in which he observes:

"Journalists – and this may not come as a surprise – are hypocrites. We lecture the rest of the world on the urgent importance of change in everything from American foreign policy to food labelling. Yet the same journalists loathe the effort and uncertainty of change as much as anyone else; their extensive experience of recommending change does not translate into any higher skills in actually facing up to it. Journalists react to digital technology’s disruption of their industry with the same queasy resentment as any other group of professionals required to rethink what they do.

"I may not be in a majority in my line of work, but I like the current technology-driven havoc precisely because journalists have to go back to first principles."