Tim J. McGuire, Star Tribune, Minneapolis, presiding: Good morning. This session has been a dream of mine for quite some time. I wanted to explore the future of content. Earl Maucker of the Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Mike Loftin of The Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times; and Paula Ellis of The State, Columbia, S.C., have done a great job in putting it together. One other person was a part of that team a year ago when we left Washington. That person was the much respected and much celebrated Nancy Woodhull. A year later Nancy is gone. That’s my own personal reminder of the fact that at the beginning of this exercise someone we respected and liked so much was with us, and now she is not. That’s how fragile this life is. God bless Nancy and God bless us that we might learn from that to live every day to its fullest.

I wanted to get some really great thinkers to talk about what content looks like today and what content is going to look like over the next 10 to 13 years. Content is the key, but content is changing. That’s what we are going to try to explore today.

I told the group that I wanted to stretch people’s views of content. I wanted to explore issues that editors need to think about. I also told the group that while we are talking to an audience of newspaper edi-tors, we don’t want to be stuck necessarily in a newspaper paradigm. Let me briefly introduce the group, and tell you why they are here.

I met Regina Joseph a year and a half ago at New Directions for News where she really challenged the assumptions of a lot of fuddy-duddy editors. She has been at the forefront of developing CD-ROMs and other ways of communicating with young people. She is now a part of Think New Ideas, a company that uses multiple platforms to develop content and marketing ideas.

Farai Chideya is someone whom you really ought to know. She is a 27-year-old journalist and author who jumps from print and books to online — she has a Web site that will knock your socks off — and she’s an analyst for CNN. She leaps from African culture to punk mu-sic. She is considered one of the outstanding twenty-something think-ers in the country.

Ted Leonsis is president and chief executive officer of America Online Studios. We’ve heard a lot of talk about AOL this week. … We won’t tell him about all of that talk. … He’s responsible for all content and all brand content ideas on AOL.

Mary Jo Meisner has most recently been editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She was editor in Fort Worth prior to that, and has been with The Washington Post and the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News. Most of you know her. She is between engagements right now, but she is on this panel because Earl Maucker was on a panel with her several weeks ago and said, "You know, Tim, she is really, really sharp. We need to have her in the discussion group."

Diane McFarlin is, as most of you know from the ballot results, the executive editor of the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune, but Diane has another title at Sarasota. She is director of broadcast. She has devel-oped a cable television station for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. She’s one of the first really multiple platform editors in the country.

Ron Martin has been a pioneer in our business. He is a founding edi-tor of USA Today, and he’s brought a lot of innovative ideas to The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, where he’s editor. He’s been especially innovative in the area of kids, something I think we’ll start talking about. I also learned this week that he is just a tremen-dous headline writer. I turned to him during the Shannon Lucid speech and said, "Boy! She’s so authentic, isn’t she?" He starts writing and shows me the headline, "Over the Back Fence With Wonder Woman," which I thought perfectly captured that speech.

George Benge was one of the outstanding newspaper designers in the country at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., then took a sharp turn and became a community newspaper editor at Muskogee and is now executive editor at the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, Ind. I hope he is going to give us a sense of how content issues affect smaller newspapers.

Bill Bass was one of the founders of Boston.com at The Boston Globe and for the last year has been analyzing media and new media for Forrester Research. If you don’t get his publications, you’re missing out on a great source of information.

So, that’s our group. We’re going to dive in.

Briefly tell me, Bill, how you define content. What does that word mean to you?

Panel discussion

William M. Bass, Forrester Research: When we think of content, clearly we think of stuff in newspapers that’s been written by journal-ists. But there’s another other set of content. There is advertising content, especially classified advertising. One of the best content ar-eas on America Online is the chat room. And there’s a lot of content out there that’s created by users. E-mail is content. All these forms of content have really driven the rise of electronic media.

McGuire: Ron, what does content mean to you?

Ron Martin, The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution: I would agree with Bill. It is a shifting, evolving thing as you mentioned yourself. Part of newspapers’ challenge is to define what part of that content we do best — what’s the best for us to focus on — and leave the chat rooms, perhaps, to others.

McGuire: Mary Jo, we’ve traditionally talked about content as infor-mation, data, stories, analysis. Talk a little bit about our traditional definition of content. Do you see it evolving in any way?

Mary Jo Meisner, Milwaukee: As newspaper people, we’ve really seen it in the context of news — covering events, reacting to them, trying to tell them passionately, but also objectively and fairly. What we’ve been perplexed by in the last couple of years as editors, is wid-ening that definition and seeing it in new ways. We’re always talking about the local news context. Now, we’re starting to see it in terms of getting our readers to write for us, stories from the very low levels of our community where they’re providing the content for our newspa-pers, removing us as the filters.

McGuire: Farai, what’s content to you?

Farai Chideya, Cable News Network: Content is anything that can be read. You can read something visually, you can read something orally, you can read something in the traditional sense. But good content is something you read that transmits information. Content doesn’t always transmit information. We tend to think of content pre-cisely as information, but increasingly it’s not. A Web site may have music that could influence whether or not you’re receptive to the rest of the content, but is that music in and of itself meaningful? It is in a stylistic sense, but it’s not necessarily in the traditional, information sense. The same is true with color in newspapers. Maybe it’s crucial in a photograph that shows a fire, maybe not so crucial in other parts of the newspaper, but color does influence how you process the rest of the surrounding content.

McGuire: Regina, you’re nodding at that. You see a broader definition of content?

Regina Joseph, Think New Ideas Inc.: I absolutely agree with Farai. I would add that the boundaries of church and state have broken down, certainly as far as younger audiences are concerned. For example, if a video game advertiser develops a really interesting site with infor-mation about how video games are developed, and they have some game modules on the site, chances are users will go there to play the content and to read the content. They’ll be absorbing the news in a way that is very different from the way people normally think about news and content. To me, content is as much about a visual vocabu-lary, especially as it applies to younger audiences, as it is about the traditional media textual vocabulary.

McGuire: Ted, you’re in charge of content for AOL. Obviously, you define content pretty broadly. What kinds of things are you looking for, and what directions do you see yourself going in?

Ted Leonsis, America Online Studios: We don’t actually use the word "content" at AOL. We think that word is limiting. We look at this as a new medium. There will be selected big categories, and those categories will have brands that become established for this new generation of consumers. Content becomes a small piece of this overall package of navigation — context and community and every-thing that is out there on the Web tapping into the voices of millions and millions of people. One of the issues the industry faces is that we think of things in discrete buckets as content: There is chat, there is advertising. I don’t think you’re going to break out of the smallness of that and think of how big a new business this really is, unless you start thinking of new brands and new businesses.

McGuire: Why brands and businesses? Why is that important?

Leonsis: Look historically at all of the industries — brands win. Media does not disaggregate. It coagulates. Your industry has proven that. Eighty-eight percent of the circulation in this country is in the hands of 25 top newspapers, within 10 companies.* Or, look at the cable in-dustry. There are really only 20 big cable brands, one or two by cate-gory, owned by the distributors. I see that trend happening in this business. The concept of 400,000 or 500,000 free Web sites has miti-gated the value of content. Brands will win. Category killers and scale will win, and some of those brands are starting to emerge. For the newspaper industry, unfortunately, because you’ve been looking at content and this medium as a way to repurpose or extend your exist-ing brand, I’m concerned that the industry might create itself quickly. Where your business took about 40 to 50 years to get into 50 million homes, and television took 20 years to get into 50 million homes, and radio took 38 years to get into 50 million homes, this business is going to be in 50 million homes in five more years. The acceleration and the short turns and cycles in this business mean, if you’re in and you’re playing to win, you have a shot. If you’re dabbling, those five years are going to go by pretty quickly.

McGuire: We’ll come back to that. Regina, are "Ren & Stimpy," and ESPN’s X Games, are those kinds of things content?

Joseph: Absolutely. We’re developing a content module right now for ESPN. This goes back to the brand discussion. We’re dealing with info glut, especially in a Web environment where we can be exposed to millions of different potential content vehicles. For me as a user, as a potential audience member, it helps to have a brand like ESPN or "Ren & Stimpy," a recognizable factor to focus on and distinguish between types of content. So, absolutely, they matter greatly.

McGuire: Diane, these outside experts are telling us that brand is im-portant. You’re taking your brand into television. Tell us about that.

Diane H. McFarlin, Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune: It’s important that we stop thinking of ourselves as products on paper and start thinking of ourselves as institutions, institutions that are in the business of pro-viding news and information that specialize in the geographic com-munity, not necessarily virtual communities. Although some of the institutions represented in this room can certainly specialize in virtual communities, the geographic community is our specialty. It’s what we do best and what we can continue to do best. I think users are going to start to get stimulus shock. They’re going to say, "Let me go to my most trusted source of news." If it’s local news they want, they’re go-ing to go to the institution that’s been providing their daily newspaper for years. We recognize that a lot of people want to get their news on TV for various reasons and at various times. They may be newspaper readers, but at certain times of the day they want to go to the TV and find out what’s going on. We wanted to be that provider. We didn’t want to let someone else come into our market and provide a 24-hour news channel for that purpose.

McGuire: Ted thinks you’re wrong. Ted?

Martin: If you really want to know, you reach for a newspaper.

Leonsis: I think newspapers — The New York Times and I have a The Washington Post, here — have ignored the local communities for the most part. There isn’t even a Local section. … There’s Weekend, Business News. … I hear a lot about newspapers going local and ...

Meisner: You may have picked the wrong examples.

Leonsis: OK, maybe I have. But, I think new brands — our Digital Cities, which is embracing newspapers as aggregators and programmers, and Microsoft’s Sidewalk — are going to be the category killers for local information.

McGuire: Why doesn’t the Sarasota Herald-Tribune kill Digital Cities and Sidewalk in Sarasota?

McFarlin: It is.

Leonsis: Well, we’ll see how it works.

McFarlin: We’re crazy if we sit still and wait for AOL and Microsoft to come to town and set up city sites to deal with what we have the expertise in. We have the critics. We have the history and understanding of all these things. These folks don’t know anything at all about our communities. All you have to do is look at Seattle Sidewalk and see what they’re doing. It’s coming your way. If you don’t get ready for it, you’re making a big mistake.

McGuire: George, how does that affect the community newspaper like the one in Lafayette?

George M. Benge, Journal and Courier, Lafayette, Ind.: Certainly, there is an impact in Lafayette, Ind., and Muskogee, Okla., but I don’t have a major problem with what they’re doing on AOL. It’s something we all have to accept and ultimately embrace if we’re going to funda-mentally change the way we deliver news to our communities, whether small communities like mine or big communities like Ron’s. For me it’s almost a Trojan horse. Is that the right word? Content in Muskogee, Okla., is two gentlemen in overalls standing in front of my desk demanding that I explain why I covered a story about their farms, and they could give a fig about AOL. For me content is a father in Lafayette, Ind., coming into my office very angrily and demanding to know why we’re not covering his girl’s basketball team as well as we’re covering the boys’ team. That’s content. Frankly, those same people are concerned about AOL. They have access to AOL, but my biggest concern is letting them define news and content for me, and I’ll worry about AOL down the road.

McGuire: Mary Jo?

Meisner: One of the interesting dynamics here is that the people to my right are talking more in terms of local news, geography, defining news, and the people to my left are talking about something slightly different. Regina talked about the breakdown between church and state. I think that’s where we as newspaper editors are having diffi-culty because the definition of content to my left is going beyond where it is on the right. We’re getting into all sorts of other kinds of things that these folks are doing very wonderfully and creatively that we don’t know how to do yet. They talk a different language. We have to be very up-front about that.

Martin: But that ought to be stimulating and exciting. There’s a great story. We ought to be covering it. We ought to be thinking about how that affects our content, how we convert that to our content, how we interact with that. I think it is a real exciting time.

McGuire: Bill, what are you hearing here?

Bass: Last April Fool’s Day, AOL did an interesting thing. They put a story on their news section that said "Life on Jupiter," and then there was "Is this really true?" I think you were quoted as saying, "Yes, this is not a joke. This is actually true." That caused a huge furor because it wasn’t true, at least not then. It was interesting because from the outside looking in — and I’d love to hear what happened on the inside — you had AOL, which had kind of this fun, hip, "We’re-appealing-to-young-people," "Ren & Stimpy" attitude over the news. When they tried that, it was a total bust. People were expecting news. When you watch "Ren & Stimpy," you expect a certain type of content and infor-mation — one that’s entertainment related. When you’re on the news side, you want news. If you want entertainment, you go to "Ren & Stimpy." The meshing didn’t work.

McGuire: Farai, do you see daily newspapers as producing content that is indispensable and compelling? If not, where do you see that kind of content?

Chideya: It depends on who you are. We’ve talked about a couple of different types of communities here. We’ve talked about actual, physi-cal, geographic communities, the kind traditionally served well by newspapers. The New York Times is not a good example of a com-munity-based newspaper. It is a national newspaper as is The Washington Post, as is the Los Angeles Times. There are a lot of newspapers that are not nationally distributed that do a very good job of serving their communities.

Leonsis: That’s 35 percent of the market.

Chideya: But it’s very different. What sort of content you turn to de-pends on who you are. People who read local newspapers to find out what’s going on with the local economy, whether it’s a good time to try to switch jobs, whether their daughter’s basketball team is being cov-ered well, may well be getting that from one type of newspaper. Peo-ple who want to know more about what’s going on on Wall Street will turn to a different kind of newspaper. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Americans who don’t seem to find newspapers indispensable at all.

I did a study for the Media Studies Center under the late Nancy Woodhull, who was a fantastic person, a real inspiration and mentor to me. She had done a study at the University of Rochester using un-dergraduates to look at newspaper content as it related to young peo-ple and found they were mostly in sports and crime coverage and not much else. The study I did, which covered a statistically randomized sample of 400 stories from newspapers of different circulation levels, found pretty much the same thing — crime and sports and not much else as it relates to young people.

That’s one reason why young adults are not generally a strong news-paper-reading audience. When you have news that does not serve your community — in this case a generational community, as op-posed to a geographic community — then you tend to tune out. Whether or not the news is indispensable depends on what commu-nity you are talking about. If you’re a young adult who is very involved in the life of your local community, and your newspaper serves that local community well, you will probably read it. If you’re a young adult who tends to identify with your generation but doesn’t rely as much on the sort of geographic placement of the news, or you do and your lo-cal paper just isn’t providing much of that, then you will tune out.

The question is how do you keep the people in the fold who are happy with the news they’re getting and then increase the base for people who don’t identify with it.

McGuire: Ted, I get the impression you think there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for newspapers — and it’s a train.

Leonsis: Oh no, no, quite the contrary. Newspaper’s core compe-tency is what’s needed in this market. I’m concerned that we’re not applying the core competency — talent and people who understand context and can package things up in a relevant way in short bites. Then, as people want more information, they can be drilling down.

I’m seeing newspaper companies look at this as a printing press, a way to protect their market. They go at the business not fully en-gaged, just trying to lock other people out. That’s one strategy. The more appropriate strategy is to say, "I can use my Web site. I can use AOL to extend, enhance, and protect my brand." It may not be a big business for a while, but the big opportunity is to say, "I’ll wash my mind of what I know, and I’ll look at what this new medium is all about, and I’ll create a new brand. I’ll create a new business. I’ll get in context with another supplier."

Microsoft and AOL are more in tune with what you said we want in Oklahoma, because we can afford to do the little league games. It’s digital, and we put the stuff up. That’s what we want. That’s what we mean by community. We’re more in line with some of the traditional ethos of newspapers — providing local information and context — than some of the big newspaper companies are.

McGuire: Regina, where are you seeing indispensable and compel-ling content?

Joseph: In the mornings, when I get up and turn on my computer and look at my e-mail, my browser defaults automatically to The New York Times Online.

I have a very specific group of content areas I go to for news. That’s vitally important for me. It just happens that the mechanism in which I actually view this content and information is more easily deliverable to me in that format. I don’t think we’re talking at cross purposes here. We should look at the convergence of both sides — the branding and content discussion and the targeted community oriented discussion — look at the relevance of both issues as they apply to newspapers. Look at The New York Times Online and The Wall Street Journal In-teractive Edition. They’re great services, but essentially they’re taking paper-based formats and just repurposing them to fit a digital me-dium.

When you look at Microsoft Network and AOL, we’re not the first to think of building branded communities online. Total New York was doing that for a while. Geo Cities, City Search, etc., all are companies that are going out and trying to build regionalized, localized, commu-nity-based news environments using their base of audience members to funnel news into their Web environments. It attacks newspapers’ distribution and finance model: "My advertising revenues are down. How do I communicate to these people who are tuning out? Do I put more money into promotion and advertising? Should I take my news-paper and put it up on the Web?" These are not the targeted discus-sions we should be having. There’s a slightly different twist on the discussion that we should be having.

McGuire: I admire your attempt to get consensus, but I’ve seen some of your work and I’ve seen some of Farai’s work and much of it would give the big one to many people in this audience. You’ve taken very different approaches to presenting ...

Joseph: But for a lot of the stuff that you’ve seen, this audience is not the target demographic that I’m trying to reach, although there is defi-nitely stuff that Farai and I have both done that speaks to this audi-ence. It’s a question of context.

If I’m making a pop culture CD-ROM magazine targeting an 18- to 25-year-old male audience, there will be a very specific content direction I’ll take. But if I am trying to position content to a male, 25- to 45-year-old consumer electronics buying audience, believe me, I’ll take a very different approach.

McGuire: What I get out of that is audience equals content. Right?

Joseph: Absolutely! Absolutely!

Chideya: It does. I’m glad you brought up CNN, because I wear a lot of different hats. I write for Time Magazine, which obviously has a very broad general audience. I write op-ed sometimes. And I have my Web site where I envision the reader as someone who is something like me — young, possibly black, possibly a woman, interested in pop music and pop culture.

When I go on CNN, I talk about inside-the-Beltway politics, something that people who read my Web site may or may not care about. But when I speak on CNN, I definitely do it in a different tone than when I talk about politics on my Web site. I also write for VIBE magazine, which is a very well respected music publication that deals with the hip-hop industry, but also does political stories, which I am in charge of. For each of those audiences, the tone that I take is different and the choice of stories is different. For example, we’ve done stories for VIBE on work fare because we’re talking to a young urban audience and work fare is going to affect them. We talked about the Amnesty International reports on police brutality because a young or urban audience cares about that. In New York City, recently, there was an-other case where a young kid was shot in the back, and that caused a lot of controversy because it got heavily into city politics. We talk about stories that should be front-page stories, and often are front-page stories in America’s newspapers, but we do it in a way that speaks to this audience.

But even though we can speak differently to different audiences, it doesn’t mean we are pandering or should be patronizing. We can cover tough stories, important stories, but we do have to play to our audience. Everyone does. As much as I love my Web site, that is certainly not my primary news identification. I started out at Newsweek, working traditional news magazine print stories, then went to MTV News, and then to CNN, so I have this interesting, var-ied experience. MTV is a perfect example of a non-news company trying to make that transition.

McGuire: Ted?

Leonsis: I look at this new medium as oxygen. Get used to it. It’s not about niches. It’s is not about edginess. It is a mass medium in the development. The New York Times is one of our partners. We’re go-ing to have more subscribers on AOL in New York City in six months than the Times does. When we started, we were much smaller. Three years ago we had less than a million people, and, as you know, we have 8 million people paying us $20 a month. Fortunately for The New York Times, they get it. They embrace it. They have a great pa-per. They have @Times, www.nytimes.com. They’re working with us to thread their content throughout. We also acquired Total New York for New York City for Digital Cities. We want to work with newspapers for the talent, we will work with you with the brands. This isn’t a fight. This has happened. It’s oxygen. Get used to it.

Benge: I disagree with that in a sense. While I certainly appreciate all the wonderful things that the online world has brought to our business and our culture and our personal lives, I find it very interesting that the folks over on the left-hand side keep coming back to newspapers again and again. I think the reason they keep coming back is what most of the people in this room would attest to: There is something about what we do as journalists that is unique, and it always will be unique. So long as we are willing and able to change tools and to dis-cuss new idioms and new ways of presenting what we uniquely do to different and new markets, I think there will always be a wonderful future for newspapers.

In the old days, newspapers competed vigorously. I worked in a lot of metro markets — Dallas, Miami, Detroit — and we used to compete against one another. Now, in many cases there is a single newspaper in major markets, and it’s a different kind of competition. The compe-tition is sitting right over there, and it is worthy, noble, tough competi-tion, but I think you will find that the things you’re saying are the things we will be doing to augment and supplement our strengths with your strengths. That’s what will make us the prime purveyor of information and news in the future.

McGuire: Quickly, Ted?

Leonsis: There are 1,100 information providers on AOL, and every six months we do audits and votes on favorite areas, most-used ar-eas, "members choice awards." Out of the 50 that were just chosen, 17 were brand new brands. There was one newspaper on that list. I believe that six months from now there may be no newspapers on that list. If 10 million people are voting what are the most useful, sought-after areas and there are no newspapers on that list, that’s a significant statistic.

McGuire: Ron Martin, one of the challenges that we have faced over the last four years is we have attempted to be one size fits all for our entire community. You’ve done good things to try to break out of that. First, do you think we have tried to be one size fits all? And talk about your attempts to get to particular audiences.

Martin: We’ve tried and need to be a mass deliverer of information in our communities. That’s a challenge for us, and one that we can’t easily give up. To say let’s just adopt an attitude — turn our baseball cap on backwards and wear baggy pants — that’s not us.

McGuire: Would you pay to see that? Show of hands?

Martin: We need to keep in mind who we are and what we are trying to do, and to do those things we do best and not get too distracted by others. At the same time, there can be attitudes and separate voices, many separate voices speaking to lots of different constituencies within our broad newspaper. We ought to look for more ways to pres-ent different kinds of voices.

McGuire: You’ve used that expression, "what we do best" a couple of times. Can you go with that a second?

Martin: We know how to report. We know how to gather information. We know how to organize and present information in a way that is co-herent. To America On Hold, and when you finally get on, you don’t know what you’re going to get. You don’t know when you’re going to get it. There’s going to continue to be a value somewhere for some-body to organize this information and say this is what it all adds up to.

McGuire: Mary Jo?

Meisner: It gets back to your word "indispensability." Ted says the Microsofts of the world will become journalists. Well, if they become journalists, then perhaps they will be indispensable, and we won’t, or we will be both be indispensable. The biggest thing we have going for us is our ability to gather and deliver that kind of local information, whether within the context of a newspaper or whatever form. If Micro-soft wants to do it and can do it like we can, then we may not be in-dispensable. But that’s where our indispensability lies right now.

McGuire: Diane, with the circulation and penetration numbers we face, can we really legitimately make the argument we are indispen-sable?

McFarlin: I go back to my belief that we have to look at ourselves as institutions. I think that we can make ourselves more indispensable by giving people more choices. We’ve said to folks, "Look, you’re getting this on paper; you’re getting it delivered to your doorstep at 6:30 a.m.; and we’re sorry if that doesn’t accommodate your lifestyle." Now, technology is allowing us to give our communities more choices, so if they want to get the paper and turn on Sarasota News Now and log into Newscoast, great! They can do that. What we sell as credibility will ultimately prevail. I really believe that. The issue for us is that our credibility is diminishing, and we’ve seen that in study after study. That’s why the project that Sandy Rowe and Ed Seaton are planning is so critical. If we don’t rebuild our credibility, then I do worry about our long-term future.

Meisner: The interesting thing with that is that the credibility erosion comes in some people’s minds in terms of attitude. You have this in-credible clash between the desire to have attitude and passion, and then the erosion of credibility.

McGuire: Regina?

Joseph: Farai and I were talking about this before. Whenever we have these discussions and the conversation turns toward the younger generation, "How do we reach them?" the term "attitude" — which is when I usually get my gun, it’s such a misused application of the word — keeps popping up. What young people are looking for is not just the injection of the turned-around baseball hat and big baggy pants and pop culture. If you look at some of the viewing patterns of young people, especially on the Web, they’re looking for news sources, just not the kind of news sources most of this audience would recognize as traditional news.

Speaking to the point of being institutions, Internet time is like dog years. It moves very, very quickly, and institutions move pretty slowly. If you look at what’s happening in terms of the growth of new sites that are catering to a younger audience, trying to speak to them and trying to deliver news and content and other types of information to them, we’re moving at a much faster pace than any of these larger, more conventional news delivery systems. One of the ways in which people can begin to have a meaningful dialogue about this is to really analyze how they look at younger audiences and how quickly they’re moving toward trying to reach them in a meaningful way.

Benge: I hope they continue to think that way, because doing so will blind them to the real strengths they’re facing over on the so-called newspaper side. There are considerable strengths and positives about newspapers, particularly as they learn and grow and adapt the tactics and strategies and all the principles that exist over on the electronic, digital side. It’s only a matter of time until you’re going to wake up and realize, "My God, we missed the boat. They were right all along. It just took them a little longer to get there."

Chideya: It’s interesting to me how adversarial this has become. It’s not like we’re at each others throats but ...

McGuire: I love it!

Joseph: You told us to do this.

McGuire: My dream is being fulfilled.

Chideya: There’s a lot of fear here, and there’s a lot of tension. The good side is that everybody here is passionate about the news and passionate about delivering content, whatever we see as content, but we have misplaced our tension, our anger, our desire to make things better. We’re talking about competing between mediums and com-peting between companies as opposed to competing with ourselves to reach an audience.

I want to bring up some specifics about newspapers as they relate to young adults. I did a project at the Media Studies Center, part of The Freedom Forum, on how young adults are portrayed by the news and how they perceive the news. We did Roper polls and asked very spe-cific questions about what young adults want from newspapers. The good news is that, for the most part, they want roughly the same type of content as older adults. But they tend to want more specific infor-mation on topics they care about particularly, which could be every-thing from computers to jobs. The problem is they see news as something that is often vague, not specific enough. When you talk about business, they want career information much more than they want to know that hog futures are up 5 percent.

If you talk about the strengths of newspapers, you talk about credibil-ity, but also being able to deliver real information to the audience. When we talk about the future of newspapers, we talk about declining and diminishing audience. Maybe, what we’re talking about is the in-ability to really reach the audience.

I’ll make one quick analogy before I stop. I spent a lot of time analyz-ing politics, and when we talk about elections, we talk about people who win and lose. Obviously, that’s very important, but we don’t often think about the nonvoting population in relation to the winners and losers. Half of the people don’t vote in midterm elections, three-quarters of Americans sometimes don’t vote. They are a huge un-tapped resource in a political sense. We need to think that way about the newspaper audience and about the news audience in general.

McGuire: Ron, Farai says this is getting adversarial, yet we have critics like your old buddy and mine, Jon Katz, who in his new book, "Virtuous Reality," says that people in this room and our newspapers hate the young. He thinks you ought to put your cap on backwards, that we’re missing that completely. What are your thoughts?

Martin: I don’t agree with that at all. I think ...

McGuire: First time you and Jon disagree, right?

Martin: Well, I wouldn’t say that. I think Jon overstates things some-times. No, I think that we do not hate the young at all. When we write about William Bennett and all of his campaigns and so on, and try to do it in a relatively straightforward, objective way, maybe he thinks we’re endorsing that. But it’s a big story — the fight over TV ratings and how you label them — we have to cover it. It doesn’t mean that we’re in favor of it.

McGuire: Bill Bass, referee a little bit. What are you hearing? What are you seeing?

Bass: It’s interesting you talk about newspapers presenting a com-plete package but, if I go through about any of your newspapers and start looking for what was created locally and how much is packaged from other people, the amount of local stuff is vanishingly small. You take out the wire stories, you take out the stock tables, you take out the classified ads, real estate and things like that, and what is left that you people in this room deliver is really a small part of the entire package. A lot of that package is easier to receive online. So I can go online and get my stock quotes. I have PointCast, which is a little system that delivers stock quotes to your computer; it’s free.

Martin: Irritating, you forget that.

Bass: It’s fairly interesting, you end up with this bimodal distribution of people who either love it or hate it. But about a million and a half peo-ple love it and have it on their screens in a year. There are enough that love it to make it important, and it’s constantly feeding you essen-tially real-time stock quotes. There is a 15-minute delay, but it’s much more real-time than tomorrow. You also get real estate. The Realtors are putting up all their homes on the Internet. People are disaggre-gating their use and going to these sites. Newspapers are always go-ing to be better at doing news than America Online, than Microsoft and the rest. There is no question about that. But that’s not going to matter, because so many people are now going to be getting a lot of their information from other sources. They’re not going to be willing to pay for this total package.

McGuire: That’s interesting that you say newspapers are always go-ing to be best at news. Do we really have news in this 24-hour world that you’re talking about, Ted? Is what newspapers have news?

Leonsis: I don’t think about content. I don’t think about newspapers. I think about talent, streams of information, context. In the future, edi-tors are going to be bartenders. That’s what I think. I know that’s a ter-rible thing to say, but the role of an editor will be social media: "I’m bringing you into a place … into a bar. I’m going to give you the news. I’m going to bring other people around who’ll talk to you about the news. I’ll find dissenting voices, and I’ll package that up for you." That’s a great new position in jobs.

Martin: Well, that’s a lousy description of what a society ought to be. Look at the Pulitzer Prizes. Look at what The Seattle Times did with its investigation on the 737 rudders. How the hell is that going to hap-pen on the Internet? I don’t know those people, but a reporter took months working on a story when the biggest industry in town, Boeing, was saying "This guy is not credible. The paper is irresponsible," and produced wonderful work that’s going to have major impact on all of us. How does that stuff happen online, if we just pretend we’re bar-tenders?

Chideya: Let me just point out that a lot of people attacked the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News story on the CIA-Contra-crack associa-tion. The Columbia Journalism Review said places like the Post spent more time attacking a story that had some fundamental truthful points than they did trying to figure out what was going on.

The only way people who were interested in that story could find out even the basics was to go to the Web site. The San Jose Mercury News is not a nationally distributed newspaper. I logged on. I looked at their story. I read supplementary publications from other places. It’s not that the Web is going to create news content as much as it is go-ing to be a funnel for distributing the best work of local journalists na-tionally.

Martin: I’m concerned that if we don’t have the advertising base, the revenue base, to support somebody spending months doing that kind of investigation, which can then be talked about on the Web, how is it going to happen?

McFarlin: We’re arguing over means of distribution, and we don’t need to be. Public service journalism can be performed on any plat-form. Newspapers are going to continue to be better at certain things, but increasingly we’ll start using our Web sites. A lot of newspaper organizations will use TV channels for certain things. That’s the key.

I’m extremely impressed by these two young women, but they’re go-ing after a very different audience than I am. Their audience is na-tional; mine is local. I’m grateful if I can get some young people. Increasingly, they’re tuning in to SNN, and I hope will use Newscoast, which is brand new and not really good yet.

But I think they’ll come to us if, as Regina said, they’re interested in the community. They’ll come to us, and they’ll choose the means of distribution that fits their lifestyles best. As they get older, they may want another form of distribution. They may increasingly turn to the newspaper. As they get older, the folks that you’re reaching now may start what you’re doing, Regina, logging into The New York Times site first. We’re just going after different markets.

Meisner: But I’m not sure that’s exactly what we’re talking about in terms of Microsoft. I don’t know where they’re going in terms of set-ting up their local news-gathering and provision sources. I don’t think that it’s just a question of delivery. I think it is a question of journalism.

Leonsis: They want your classified business. It’s a pretty simple equation.

Joseph: What MSN wants to do is create a regional environment through which people can access service-based information as op-posed to news. Stories that require months and months of careful re-search are not what these Sidewalk sites are going to be about. These Sidewalk sites are going to be about restaurant reviews and classified ads and getting down to hard-core service information that people will access that site for specifically. With regard to news, that can take another format.

McGuire: Mary Jo, you used the magic word, "journalism." Everybody in this room thinks they know what that means. What do you mean when you use "journalism"? I think that was where Ron was going, too.

Meisner: I’m jumping off of Ron. There’s another component there. It is higher moral values. Not moral, that’s the wrong word. It’s a cause.

McGuire: Let’s now sing, "Kumbaya." But isn’t that a real issue for you, Ted, that journalism is a higher moral, spiritual thing?

Leonsis: It’s a wonderful calling, and it’s terrific. ...

McGuire: But, you can’t make any money off it.

Leonsis: No, no, but you don’t make any money off it either, right?

Unidentified: Sure I do.

Leonsis: Let’s be frank, in the business model of newspapers, if 10 percent of classified revenues moves someplace else, many newspa-pers in this society go from being profitable to being unprofitable. Pages would be fewer. Editorial coverage would be less. You’re in a real, real critical time, because circulation is not growing, but ad rates are increasing. It’s not, ultimately, the best business case. And we just dismissed PointCast. They went from zero to almost 2 million cus-tomers in 13 months.

Benge: Well, there’s no question what he’s saying is true. We are, in some respects, an industry under siege. But it’s also quite true that the greatest changes, I hate to use the "p" word, but the greatest paradigm shifts frequently occur when you do find a group or an in-dustry under siege and under stress, just as an oyster produces the finest pearls when there is an irritant. And, frankly, I think that the on-line new media is an irritant, but it is a positive irritant. It is an irritant that we’ll all learn from and embrace. In time, given our core strength, which is journalism and credibility within the public, it will produce a big winner for all of us. It doesn’t necessarily discredit or preclude anything that happens in other areas of news gathering.

McGuire: I want to go back to the bartender. ...

Leonsis: Would a publisher say that the core competency of a news-paper consists of circulation development, and understanding the demographic, and ad sales and classified sales and editorial, that those four legs of the stool make a newspaper what it is as a brand and an entity? ...

Martin: And community building.

Leonsis: Community building … that’s what I keep saying. That’s what we value so incredibly highly in making this medium real. There is no AOL newsroom where we’re writing news. Microsoft is totally functioning as they see they can go into an area and that the classi-fied business is at risk. It’s cheaper to self-publish classifieds. As criti-cal mass emerges in the cities, that’s where the risk is for the industry. My comment is, come to us; we will work with you.

McGuire: Let me go back to the bartender concept. Is context king or is content king?

Benge: Context is king. If I can oversimplify the case to make a point, I think that as journalists we are uniquely positioned and trained to provide context that people crave and need in their daily lives, whereas on the other new media side they are uniquely positioned to provide zillions and zillions more megabytes of information than we possibly can in any one day. Nonetheless, I think we are very much on the side of context, and I’m hearing content, content, content over here and very little about context, which provides a basis for under-standing of important and complicated issues.

McGuire: Mary Jo?

Meisner: Journalism. That’s journalism. It’s the context. I’m with George.

McGuire: Regina, what about context?

Joseph: I don’t think you can have content really that matters to any-one without context. In any distribution medium in which there can be millions of potential competitors, if I can’t give a distinct context to my content, my content will be lost. Ultimately, the bottom line behind any of this is it has to make money for somebody, unless you’re the cas-ual user who wants to create your own personal Web site as a labor of love. If we’re talking about real businesses and industries, then there has to be a context to the content. Otherwise, there’s no hope of reaching our audience.

McGuire: Bill, the group says the context is real important. What about Firefly and CRAYON and these other artificial intelligence en-gines that might do that selecting for a consumer and reader? Does that put us out of business?

Bass: It doesn’t put you out of business, but it definitely reduces the value of the editor in picking stories or it increases. … If I read the Atlanta Journal and Constitu-tion, Ron has to figure out what I think is important, and he has to do that for hundreds of thousands of folks in the Atlanta area. There are some things that are pretty easy: the Braves, pretty much everybody will want to know about them. But when you get into some of the more esoteric stuff, it’s harder. You go to these artificial intelligence agents and say, "I want to know about this, this and this," and they deliver it to you. If they’re smart, they say, "You know, if you like those things, you’ll probably like these things as well."

Are they going to put newspapers out of business? No, because the fundamental content behind it is still coming from The New York Times, from the Atlanta papers, from the San Jose paper. What these agents are doing is it is packaging information at the aggregate level across all the Internet.

Leonsis: Newspapers are not going out of business.

Benge: Thank you.

Leonsis: There is a defensiveness, sometimes, in newspapers them-selves that brings some of this up. They’re not going out of business. Television didn’t go out of business with cable, but I’ll tell you that 10 years ago I sat in a conference in a meeting like this where Ted Turner was on, and there were some broadcast network executives who were saying, "This isn’t journalism. This isn’t going to work. This is chicken noodle network spending too much money and not making any." Time corporate offered $5 million for it. Right? And didn’t do it, and now they paid $7 billion for it, and it’s the place where television news is defined. It’s a matter of whether to embrace it or push it away. Newspapers are not going out of business. There’s a way to take your core competencies and move up the value chain in this new medium. That’s what this session should be about.

McGuire: Let’s go with that. Very quickly, pick our core competencies and move up the value chain. Thoughts about doing that. Farai?

Chideya: I’m really torn in some ways. On the one hand, I believe deeply, profoundly in journalism, in credibility, in reporting, in each journalist having a stake in his or her story, making or breaking his or her reputation. Every time you put something out, it says something about you and about your institution. On the other hand, there is a man I know of who does an analysis of how television is changing. While ABC, NBC, and CBS are still the most powerful television enti-ties, especially when it comes to news, there is no question that not only did cable change the equation, but that the cumulative effect will be much more profound when it comes to the next generation. I’m 27, I grew up having the TV go off with the Stars and Stripes and then fuzz. Kids today don’t get any fuzz. There is no fuzz. It is 24 hours of infomercials, and usually something else. How do they know which one is better than the other? This analyst makes a very persuasive case that they put as much weight on network A as network B as net-work C. The more things there are, the more choices you have, the more diffuse your loyalty, if there is any at all. I want there to be more voices because I think sometimes the traditional news business has become complacent. The traditional newspaper business is not serv-ing young adults well, and that is one constituency I’ve looked at. It is not serving African Americans well. Those are two constituencies that I belong to and I care about. The newspaper business isn’t doing a great job of that. Will online do better? I’m not sure about that.

McGuire: Ron, how do we get indispensable?

Martin: Maybe we can learn from what she’s saying. We need to be watching the things that you’re working with, that you’re reading on-line yourself, and see if there are ways that our newspapers can in-teract with those things, build on those things, be part of that conversation. There is wonderful, exciting stuff online if you have time enough to look it up. We ought to figure out some way to bring the best of that into our printed forum and extend the conversation rather than running away from it.

McGuire: Regina, your last shot at newspaper editors. What can they do to move up that value chain that Ted talks about?

Joseph: I’m basically in agreement with the last two comments. I think that there has to be a merging of concerns. As Farai, I also pro-foundly believe in the institution of journalism. I come from traditional media journalism, and just because I’m now in a digital media envi-ronment, doesn’t lessen for me the importance or impact of news journalism. There has to be a way in which some of the elements that have appealed to me from the older medium, the paper format, can filter through into the digital environment. There really has to be a co-operative relationship. Otherwise, both stand to lose greatly.

McGuire: Mary Jo?

Meisner: We have to listen to what Bill is saying about the content of our newspapers. We need to strip away some of the material that’s provided from other places and start bringing what we can — local interpretation of lots of different things and more and more localness. That is where our indispensability truly lies.

McGuire: Bill?

Bass: That’s interesting. This started off as old people versus young people, and "Are we losing the young people?" I was thinking that we probably had this same discussion in the ’80s and the ’70s and the ’60s and the ’50s. Young people have never thought the same as older people, and older people have always controlled media distribu-tion.

McGuire: A lot of people say it’s different this time. Do you reject that?

Bass: Baloney! I totally reject that. The ’60s were different. The ’90s weren’t different, but we now have this technological ability for people to go out and get their own news. It’s the technology. It’s not, "Do we need to change our content?" Go to any newspaper and it has hun-dreds of years worth of papers up on the walls. Look at the ones from the 1890s and the ones from the 1990s. They look pretty much the same. Now, we have this irritant. Is it going to form a pearl? Papers haven’t had to change for a hundred years. I question whether they’ll be able to make this change — the first really fundamental change in the way they have to do business in a hundred years.

Benge: I disagree very much with what you’re saying. Everybody in this room, and most of us here at this dais, can attest to the fact that we’ve undergone changes at the speed of light over the last 20 years. It wasn’t so very long ago, 25 years ago, that our industry was printing with virtually the same methods Gutenberg was using. Now ...

McGuire: You three don’t think we’ve changed at the speed of light, do you?

Benge: We’ve had to make fundamental changes very rapidly.

McGuire: Farai, quickly, why not?

Chideya: There are so many reasons. One of the reasons the news-paper audience is diminishing is because newspapers have remained essentially the same, and this country is changing on many levels — generationally, racially, and in the sense of community. We don’t just live within our communities. Most people commute. Most people have a broader sense of this nation. Newspapers may or may not reflect that.

McGuire: Ted?

Leonsis: I want to go back to how to get on the value chain. There’s a short but open window to take your brand and build another brand around it in your community, so that you become a local aggregated program, a little bit like what Boston.com and Bill were trying to do. You embrace the other voices and build community in it, so that you have your brand, and it can stay just the way it is, but you create an-other business. Work with us. We’ll get you the circulation and the tools, and together, hang on, together we’ll fight Microsoft.

McGuire: I hate to cut it off but I’ve been a taskmaster this week in making sure the trains run on time, and I have to hold myself to the same standard. I hope you will join me in thanking our panel.