By Deborah Howell
Sunday, April 30, 2006

SEATTLE -- The American Society of Newspaper Editors gathers once a year, and this year editors are commiserating about budget cuts and dropping circulation and looking for ways to make their newspapers better and more attractive to readers.

The feeling of uncertainty is powerful. Editors know their trade is changing rapidly, but they wonder, as John Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times, did: "Are newspaper editors really necessary?"

Or will Internet users just roam the Web, picking and choosing what they wish to know? Rick Rodriguez, editor of the Sacramento Bee and this year's president of ASNE, put it this way: "We can believe that we're on the path to irrelevancy . . . and that presses are the bones of dinosaurs." Or, he said, "We are in the best position in each of our communities . . . to prove skeptics dead wrong. No one else can do [journalism] as well as we can."

For all the naysayers about the newspaper business, two major players -- Gary Pruitt, chief executive of McClatchy Co., and Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group Inc. -- are bullish about ink on paper. They better be, because they are making huge investments to buy more.

McClatchy will be the second-largest owner of newspapers in the country after buying Knight Ridder, formerly No. 2, and Singleton is moving to buy some of the Knight Ridder papers that McClatchy didn't want, including four this week. McClatchy is a public company that will have to pay more attention to Wall Street than will MediaNews, which is privately owned. As Pruitt said, there is "no security unless we do well in the market."

Pruitt sees "great leverage" in owning newspapers and expanding online with news products delivered "24-7 . . . and when [readers] want." Singleton cautioned the editors about reporters writing more for each other and for prizes than for readers. He said readers want more information and entertainment news and fewer long series. He added, "The whole story is local. Iraq is not as important as local."

Editors create newspapers, hope readers like them and deliver them mostly in the morning. And is their version of quality what readers want? At The Post, that's a question asked every day in a newsroom covering local news -- and Iraq.

Pruitt said, "We have to have the leading online local sites." Singleton pointed out perhaps the biggest problem: "We're not paid for online news." Pruitt suggested that newspapers charge online for readers outside the paper's circulation area.

Newspaper stock analyst William Drewry, managing director and head of media at Credit Suisse Securities, told editors several times what they know but don't want to hear: Wall Street cares less about quality journalism than profits.

Even if newspapers change, will readers care about the changes? Two newspapers, the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News and the Hamilton Spectator in Ontario, have tried radical changes to appeal to readers. Dana Robbins, Spectator editor in chief, said 600 readers canceled the paper and, in a survey, 40 percent of readers said they hadn't noticed the changes.

One hit of the convention was a panel of mostly twentysomethings showing how they're changing journalism online. One wag in the audience said, "They don't make me feel so old as they make me feel stupid."

Ken Sands, online publisher of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., said newspapers have "to fly into the future and build the plane while it's in the air."

Matt Thompson, deputy editor of StarTribune.com in Minneapolis, cautioned editors to think that "the basis of journalism is not the story," but the takeoff point to give readers more information. For instance, in a story about a house fire, he urged editors to explore the socioeconomic makeup of the neighborhood and firefighters' response times.

Nathan Stoll is the product manager for Google News, a Web page that links to news stories from around the world, something that makes newspaper editors uneasy. Google, he said, "is trying to help consumers get multiple perspectives" by offering them news from many venues. Stoll said Google doesn't "have a culture where you have to get permission to do something new. The pace of change won't slow down."

Adrian Holovaty, who lives in Chicago, said it took him about 40 hours to put together ChicagoCrime.org, an amazing Web site that tracks crime in Chicago, street by street.

Holovaty also telecommutes as editor of editorial innovations at washingtonpost.com; he put together the Web site's new congressional voting database, which should satisfy readers who complain that The Post doesn't publish the results of as many votes as they would like. The database, updated several times a day, is chock-full of ways to look at congressional votes, including by astrological sign. ("I don't know how I got by with that," Holovaty said.) Users can sign up to be notified every time a member of Congress takes a vote.

The good news: The young panelists agreed Internet users are "passionate readers of news," as Stoll said. They don't want just one story; they want 10, and they can find them easily.

Carroll spoke eloquently of the need "to save journalism. Newspapers dig up news. Others repackage it." But Jennifer Sizemore, managing editor of MSNBC.com, said: "The [Internet] user gets to drive their own experience."

How those two perspectives are reconciled will be the future of journalism.

Deborah Howell can be reached at 202-334-7582 or atombudsman@washpost.com.