Spare Us the Eulogy

What a weekend.

After driving five hours to Saratoga Springs on Friday to arrive just in time for lunch at the New York Press Association’s (NYPA) Spring Convention, we found our table and got an earful from the keynote speaker, who announced to the room that “news in print is about to disappear.”

Ken Paulson, president of The Newseum in Washington D.C., wasn’t rehashing the same old eulogy for newspapers that we’ve heard time and time again. “They were the iPods of the 1690s—that was the last time newspapers were cutting edge,” he joked. But his message was intended to be one of hope, as he explained cheekily how readers today can avoid the pitfalls of reading news online by rediscovering newspapers (no pop-up ads, Internet viruses or trouble using them on an airplane). Of course, he was preaching to the choir.

Despite the fact that the room was filled with several hundred of what some may describe as an endangered species talking about many of the same issues we in the business read about daily, there were some educational moments. Aside from being a trade show, awards ceremony, networking extravaganza and coworker-bonding opportunity, there were also a slew of classes for professional development.

While brushing up on some of the core functions of reporting, writing and editing is never a bad idea—although there were a few needless journalism 101 class-type lectures—there were a few “a-ha” moments. But the classes were mostly about form, style, time management and how best to approach a story. Nothing you’d care to read about here.

What was amusing was that there were a large number of Long Island newspapers there—enough to make it appear as if it was evenly split between upstate and LI, making for an amusing upstate-downstate rivalry at times with a few anti-LI jokes being thrown around. To be clear, the NYPA is an organization made up of weeklies and small dailies across the state. Not every single paper in the organization came to the conference, but there were 3,000 submissions from 182 newspapers in the 50 different contests that awards were given for.

Most interesting was the tendency for the conversations to gravitate back to the issue of the Web. Paulson proposed at the end of his lunchtime speech a commonly rehashed cheerlead for the iTunes model: charging something like a nickel per story and making readers pay a monthly fee. In one of the last classes of the conference, a group of editors reminisced on how spelling names correctly used to be the biggest concern on the job. Now it’s how do we come up with a new business model to make newspapers viable on the Web since readers expect everything for free (*note: we’ve always been free in print and online, always will be).

There were also discussions on how our competition used to be clear, but now the world is flat and every news outlet is a competitor thanks to aggregators like Google News. Even “some kid named Bobby from Long Island” is a competitor now, someone joked. For me, this just makes it more fun. As everyone bellyached over the fact that the industry is in flux, they seemed to miss this point, which was as clear as day.

It’s healthy competition that makes this industry work. For such a bunch of dorks, all journalists really are just a group of adrenaline junkies pushing ourselves for the next big scoop that we can get over on our rivals. It may sound cynical, but it’s true. And if it didn’t work like that, scandals would go un-exposed, corruption would continue to corrode our government and democracy would suffer as a result.

(This isn’t to say that media consolidations aren’t a threat—even the editor of one local weekly newspaper group, The Brooklyn Paper, was there happily sharing the news that his paper was recently bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. But overall, the weekly newspaper business has been described by media analysts as in a better position to weather the storm than the wave of daily newspapers that are going broke or out of business at a pace of about once a week these days.)

Although it may come off as self-serving sometimes for us to tout all the awards we won (the Press took home eight, by the way), journalism awards contests themselves are the embodiment of what makes this business work harder to break better news. If there was anything to be learned from this weekend, it’s that the Fourth Estate is alive and well, albeit bruised and battered of late.