Rob smaller

It was the early 1990s. I was seated with the rest of the sports staff at the Florida paper for an all-staff meeting in matching orange chairs, under egg-yolk fluorescent lights within windowless walls the shade of faded cardboard in a conference room — which they sometimes rented out for wedding receptions — to discuss the “future of news.”

We were told that we were about to change the world.

The folks who brought to you color-coded newspaper sections, and coin boxes purposely designed to look like (vaguely, as it turned out) television sets, were launching a decade-long plan called “News 2000,” which not only would redirect the focus of news coverage, but would be our primary weapon in the brewing war against something called the World Wide Web that was marching toward domination along another thing called the Information Superhighway.

We were a jaded, confident bunch — in part because we were housed in a palace of a building with a skylight-covered atrium running the length of two football fields, cooks on hand to make our meals, black onyx toilets and gold-plated fixtures in the bathrooms, and a three-foot-high marble bust of the chain’s founder set among plants across from the reception desk.

In retrospect, the alligators that sunned and bathed themselves in the retention ponds outside our windows should have been an omen.

I suppose at the time we should have realized that such a plan hatched in the early ’90s would be woefully behind the times by the moment when Y2K destroyed the Internet, but most of the ink-stained veterans amassed in the big orange room fell back upon their ingrained cynicism, shrugged their shoulders and let out a collective “OK, that sounds swell … is it time for lunch?”

As the presentation was wrapping, we were told that each paper in the purple-for-life, TV coin box chain was approaching NEWS 2000 under independent themes — and ours wouldn’t travel an Information Superhighway, but a yellow brick road toward our goal a la “The Wizard of Oz.”

“Does this mean,” asked a particularly cynical voice from the sports department, “that when all this is over, we’re going to wake up and discover that it’s all been just a bad dream?”

I never have known when to keep my thoughts to myself.

NEWS 2000 was prescient in ways that we couldn’t have seen then. A focus on stories of hyper-local importance, for instance, and the need to expand beyond traditional just-the-facts storytelling.

But just as our earliest ancestors would discover that word-of-mouth storytelling would find itself doing battle against World Wide Petroglyphs, those of us who have spent their careers in the newspaper business had no idea that the Internet would descend upon our lives like the invasion of the Flying Monkeys.

If you’re still reading this (or even if you’re not), you have heard all the horror stories about the “death of newspapers.”

News itself these days is under attack, the stories go, and the print publications that remain are merely dinosaurs awaiting the next meteor shower.

When one of those meteors struck down the Mail Tribune in Medford last month, the shock waves were felt by more than the industry and the ink-stained cynics who had suddenly lost their jobs.

“I can’t even tell you,” State Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, told The Oregonian, “the void it left in my life when it went under.”

And that’s what gets lost by those who would look at the demise of the Muddy Tributary, ascribe it to a national trend, shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, that’s too bad. … Is it time for lunch?”

There are folks among us who religiously checked the Obituaries, read the Comics, and tried their hand at Jumble, Sudoku and the crossword puzzle — and were prompt to let us know when a solution box was missing or the Scrabble form went above the fold and made it difficult to play.

For a community newspaper isn’t about the newspaper, or the bells and whistles attached to it in order to catch up with the latest incarnation of the smartphone. … It’s about the community.

One community is not the same as the one next door, or the one thousands of miles away. We’re told than more than 2,500 newspapers have closed over the past 20 years, and the temptation is to settle for the easy answer — that all have stopped printing, or posting, for the same reasons as part of a national trend.

Harder to accept, but closer to the truth, is that there are more than 2,500 reasons for the loss — some similarities, certainly, but a different combination of internal and external factors that caused each meteor to strike.

The Rogue Valley Tribune, incorporating the present and the past modes of communication, has sprung from such ashes and, given this opportunity, we hope to have the brains, the heart and the courage to find our way back home.