What will happen to our civic mission?

As people envision different ways of delivering the news, newspaper editors automatically think, and sometimes ask aloud: What will happen to our civic mission?

You know, the watchdog role, the public conscience, the guardian of the public purse, the First Amendment crusader maintaining a check on government power - what will happen to that?

The question is not what will happen to that, but what has already happened to that. Yes, yes, I know, the Pulitzer Prizes this year highlighted the great watchdog work that newspapers are still doing: The New York Times and Washington Post exposing secret abuses of power by the Bush administration, the San Diego Union-Tribune exposing the corruption of Duke Cunningham, the Times-Picayune exposing the bungling that left New Orleans unnecessarily vulnerable to Hurricane Katrina. I applaud all of that. And the editors gathering in Seattle this week for the American Society of Newspaper Editors are right to celebrate those achievements.

But a slide that Stephen Gray showed the editors in Wednesday's presentation on API's Newspaper Next project shows how endangered our watchdog role already is. Declining lines on the slide showed newspaper readership by generations. Two lines - people born from 1962 to 1971 and those born since 1972 - declined to their current rate of readership in the low 20s and heading down to 20 percent.

If three-quarters or more of people in their 40s and younger aren't reading the great public service journalism we do, how long will we continue having impact. Gray noted that journalists sometimes react to innovative suggestions by saying that we shouldn't "dumb down" our products. Well, how smart can it be to cling to a business model that three-fourths of people under 40 don't read?

"The only way we can fulfill our civic mission is by engaging the public," Gray told the editors.

I think we need to stop worrying about dumbing down our products and find ways to wise up and carry our messages to new audiences. Those people who aren't reading newspapers aren't all dumb. We need to become smart enough to find new ways to reach them and new ways to make money from the vast amounts of information we collect.

ASNE's Wednesday programs showed several ways to serve our time-honored mission using new channels and new technology. Gray talked about identifying information "jobs to done" in the lives of potential consumers in the businesses of potential advertisers, a topic I wrote about during the Newspaper Next Symposium in February.

Gray recalled taking his son, Ben, to college, feeling afraid and depressed as he bid farewell to such an important person in his life. Newspapers, he said, are like that parent who's reluctant to let go. "We want it to be the way it used to be."

Instead, he said, we need to "look at the world of opportunities" young people are facing and head into that future with them. "They love all these new alternatives and opportunities available to them."

A panel later in the morning gave the editors a glimpse at some of those alternatives and how newspapers might become one of those opportunities.

Nathan Stoll, the youthful product manager for Google News, gave a "jobs to be done" story about how that Google product - which newspapers see as such a threat - came to be: After 9/11, a Google engineer wanting to read as much as he could about various pressing issues and developments, became frustrated with the difficulty of searching out various stories. So he developed the program that became Google News.

He talked of "Google Labs," a place where the company's engineers can experiment and develop their own pet projects. How many newspapers have innovation labs?

"Set up a culture within your organization that embraces change and experimentation and innovation," Stoll said.

Jennifer Sizemore, managing editor of MSNBC.com, told of developing and trying new storytelling techniques on the fly while covering Hurricane Katrina.

A middle-aged editor asked the youthful panel how papers run by folks our age can tap into the experience and outlook of youth.

Matt Thompson, deputy editor for StarTribune.com in Minneapolis, said the newsrooms run by middle-aged editors "are full of people our ages." Editors need to trust their staff members with different perspectives and "bring them together and let them play outside the supervision of your managerial ways."

Marcus Chan, editor of multimedia for the San Francisco Chronicle, started podcasting off the paper's web site, saying "screw it" when editors balked at the initial idea. Once he got it up and running, other bosses embraced the project. "It offers us another channel to offer the content that we're gathering anyway."

Adrian Holovaty, editor of editorial innovation at washingtonpost.com, showed off his chicagocrime.org web site, developed on his own time before he joined the Post, way outside the supervision of your managerial ways. Holovaty updates his crime database daily from the Chicago police web site, but users find their own stories, asking about particular types of crime, crime on particular dates or near particular addresses. The project took him about 40 hours to produce, he said. Now everything is automated. Same with the Post's database of all congressional votes since 1991.

Just as reporter gathers information for a story, Holovaty gathers information for his databases. Like a reporter distills information by deciding what's worth writing about, Holovaty distills information by deciding which queries to offer users. As a reporter presents information by writing a story, Holovaty presents information by designing the web site.

And it performs that traditional watchdog role in the grand tradition of old-fashioned journalism.