Editors and CEOs share hope for newspapers

You hear it every day, Rick Rodriguez said: Newspapers are dying.

Rodriguez, executive editor of the Sacramento Bee and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, asked his colleagues Tuesday whether they believe that newspapers face extinction and the printing presses "will soon become the bones of the dinosaur."

The ASNE convention opened with strong defiance against the predictions of gloom. For starters, Rodriguez proclaimed, "We provide content that no one else has, no one else can do as well as we can and that remains our future."

Lest you think the optimism came just from editors unwilling to acknowledge change they don't like, the message of hope came also from CEOs willing to invest billions in the future of newspapers.

William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group, said his papers are investing $500 million in new presses: "If we believe in spending half a billion dollars on presses that are going to last 40 years, we really believe that print has a long future."

Gary Pruitt, CEO of the McClatchy Co., whose company is buying Knight-Ridder in a deal valued at $4.5 billion, predicted fast growth of online business for newspaper companies, offsetting a "slow erosion of the print audience. ... It's more dramatic to say it's the end of the world, but it's not."

Even the Wall Street voice who joined Pruitt and Singleton on a Tuesday afternoon panel agreed that newspapers aren't doomed. Newspapers can succeed by being bold and aggressive, said Credit Suisse analyst William Drewry. "The success in the future comes from playing offense, not defense."

Neither Pruitt nor Singleton would answer the pressing question about the immediate future in the newspaper business: whether MediaNews would be buying any or all of the 12 Knight-Ridder "orphans" that McClatchy does not plan to keep.

"Never have I seen so many people write so much about things they didn't know," Singleton said.

The hopeful speakers acknowledged that the news business will be changing and that newspapers will need to change to reach the healthy future they envision.

Newspapers need to build on their status as the leading local information providers on the Internet and develop strong local search capabilities, Pruitt said.

Newspaper editors need to make their products "much more compelling than they are today," Singleton said. "Once and for all, we're going to have to quit writing and editing for each other and write and edit for that consumer out there."

Rodriguez reminded the editors, "While we figure out the future we must guard the best of the past." Whatever changes lie ahead, he said, editors must maintain their commitment to fairness, accuracy, independence and integrity.

The forward-looking convention continues Wednesday with Stephen Gray, managing director of API's Newspaper Next project, showing the editors how newspapers can seize the future by mastering the techniques of disruptive innovation.