I walked into Loblaw’s the other day and didn’t find a sign anywhere telling me that no one buys groceries anymore. I walked into a car dealership and in spite of all that’s going on in their world, didn’t see anything that told me that no one is buying cars anymore. But hardly a week goes by when I pick up a newspaper - doesn’t matter which newspaper - and someone isn’t telling me that nobody reads newspapers anymore. What a way to do business.

Think about it for a moment - pretty much all of us here today have a stake of some kind in the newspaper industry. And for whatever reason our industry seems intent on letting just about everybody know that we’re in trouble, that people under the age of 25 don’t read anymore. Sometimes, as I’m being told that nobody reads newspapers anymore I feel like standing up and screaming - this nobody does.

So that’s a little off-topic for where I’m supposed to begin. But I’ll be honest with you, as a kid who grew up delivering newspapers, collecting the important ones like Kennedy Shot and Man on the Moon, phoning in sports results from my high school to the Globe and Mail, working my way through university on the re-write desk of the London Free Press, and has been in various writing positions for the past 30 years at three big city Canadian dailies, those of us who love newspapers, care passionately about them, fret about them, need to scream out loud every once in a while. Just to let you know we’re still there - and we still care - and we still matter.

When I got called to speak here today, my first reaction was to wear black. I always wear black when delivering eulogies. Then I was informed, in quite emphatic tones, that this was no eulogy, this was to be uplifting and humorous and anecdotal, positive and engaging. And I thought to myself - you’ve got the wrong guy.

This is, as we all know, a challenging time for all businesses - but long before the economy faltered, it was a challenging time for newspapers. I know that, because hardly a day goes by, in the industry and outside the industry, when I don’t hear that, read that or end up in a conversation about that. A challenging time yes - the death of newspapers, no matter what Warren Buffet might think, not.

The challenge to the newspaper is really nothing new. When Marconi invented the radio, the newspaper was supposed to die. Why read about the news when you can hear about the news. But it didn’t die. When television was invented in the 1930s, the newspaper was supposed to die. Why read about the news when you can watch the news from the convenience of your living room. But it didn’t die. And along the way an interrelationship developed between radio and television and newspaper - a dependency of sorts on each other, that has grown, altered, and morphed into different shapes and different kinds of relationships.

Then came the Internet and the laptop and the home computer and why would anyone pay for a newspaper when you can read just about all of it online, without any cost at all. That’s a question we’re still dealing with today and those who made the decision to give their product away for free online have much to answer for in this changing media world.
But the struggle now is to find precisely what the public wants: what they want from the newspaper, the printed version; what they want online; and how they want their information. We do know this - people want and demand information. They demand it immediately. They demand it differently than ever before. But all the perimeters now have changed and are complicated in so many different ways.

When I got into the newspaper business 30 years ago, the cycle of news was rather basic. Newspapers broke the stories. We took enormous pride in that. Those stories were picked up in the morning by the radio newsreaders. Rip and read, they would call it. The newspaper wrote it. They ripped it off and read it. Later that day, television news, which was rather laid back at the time, followed up the newspaper story. That was 1979.

Welcome to 2009. I work in the sports world where newspapers break fewer stories than ever before. It has little to do with the quality of the reporting work done and more to do, especially in a city such as this, with the resources that television networks throw at the sports world. Let’s say the Maple Leafs are practicing today. Not for any special reason, just a between games practice in the middle of the season at Lakeshore Lions Arena.

It could be any day of the week and that one hockey team on that one day will draw a reporter from the Sun, Star, Globe, Post, and Canadian Press, radio reporters from the Fan 590 and AM 640, television crews from TSN, Rogers Sportsnet, The Score, and Leafs TV and local television crews from Global and CBC and City TV not to mention internet reporters from websites and those from publications such as The Hockey News.
And that’s on a day when nothing’s going on.

So every time you try and do an interview, you get a camera in your face, a microphone in your face; it isn’t conducive to getting exclusive material. And in the meantime, outlets such as TSN, have a team of hockey reporters who work their telephones and blackberries feverishly, so you ask yourself what chance does a newspaper have to be exclusive anymore when they are up against numbers and resources they can’t match.
The answer to that, like most newspaper answers, is not so simple.

The news cycle I grew up in - where newspaper breaks the story, and goes to radio etc. has changed in the sports world. If you break a story in the afternoon, no matter what medium you work in today, it goes online first. TSN won’t go to air in the afternoon with a breaking story. They will go online with it, just as we will at the Sun.

Once upon a time, that was taboo. If you had a scoop, you waited to get it in the paper; you wanted it in print first. Today, you can’t wait anymore, because even if you have something to yourself in the mid afternoon, it doesn’t mean it will be exclusive ten hours later. And if you choose to wait, you’re gambling and more often than not, losing. So we in the newspaper business, the hardcore types, biting our tongues along the way, have finally agreed to break news online.

In the sports world, though, the most powerful engines in both Canada and the US are the large sports networks. They break a good portion of the news that’s worth breaking. It goes to the Internet first, then either television or radio. And here’s where those of us in the newspaper business have to change. Once upon a time, we told you who what where when and why. Those were the journalism school basics. Now we need to tell them differently.

When you wake up in the morning to read your newspaper, you might already know the who, the what, the where and the when. But what newspapers still do better than anyone else is - we give you the why. We supply the context. We explain. We answer your questions. We provided viewpoints. We expand the story to a place that three minutes on television or a few seconds of radio can’t take you.

It’s what the newspaper of the future, the successful newspaper, should do better than anyone else. We can still do that more effectively, more efficiently, than any other media. Why? Because of our background as journalists. Because we’re trained to do this. And for a newspaper like the Sun, which offers up a myriad of opinions and voices, ????

I want go back to the cycle of news, for a moment, and address a real concern in the industry and a real growth element. We have all heard, seen, read blogs online. Where the name came from, I don’t know. I do know that blogging has really blurred the lines for working journalists and bloggers, a few of them excellent, the majority of them not, and it has complicated the landscape for both the consumer and the producer of news. A blog, essentially, is an online column. There are some terrific blogs on the internet. And there are many horrendous, non-factual ones. The challenge for the consumer today is determining the difference between quality and junk, determining the difference between someone who knows what he is talking about and someone doesn’t. The challenge for those who care desperately about newspapers and high level journalism is to make people understand what is credible and what is not. Because too much of what is getting online is just nonsense.

A quick story of how twisted the news cycle has gotten in this difficult time. An American television commentator went on ESPN a few months back and stated that Chris Bosh had told the Toronto Raptors that he no longer wanted to play here and would not re-sign when his contract is up in 2010. ESPN, which happens to be a very credible news source, thought so little of the comment, they chose not to report it on their own news or their website. But a blogger in New York, who writes primarily about the New York Knicks, took the report as fact and then wrote on his blog about how nice it would be if the Knicks signed Chris Bosh.

Now this is where you worry about where news is going in this free-flowing time. A phone-in caller on sport radio, on The Fan 590 in Toronto, asked the host about the Bosh story, indicating he had read it on this Knicks blog. Without so much as checking the story out, on their next newscast that morning on the FAN, they began reporting that ESPN was reporting that Bosh wanted out. Enter the newspaper reporters, about to go to practice that day. With the radio blaring with the supposed news about Bosh wanting out, Bosh became the story of the day. He was the news in the paper. He was in the columns the next day. He was all over the place denying that any meeting had ever taken place and that he had not changed his mind about his status with the Raptors. And he was probably right - and the rest of us were all wrong.

All of this started with an assumption - and a number of assumptions that followed. That isn’t news. But that’s the danger of the new media and all that sprouts from it. It isn’t based on sourcing. Online journalists, if you want to call them that, don’t play by the same rules, either with editors or with their own lawyers. But the public doesn’t know the difference. And somehow, we need to get the message out better. We need to better educate people about credibility. The newspaper is still where accountability and credibility matters. It still comes from here. Where Watergate was broken by the Washington Post. By industrious reporters, dealing in fact and not in supposition. We in newspapers need to be the voice of accountability. When a little girl disappears in Woodstock, we need to background the story. We can do that better, more thoroughly, still, than any other source.

I believe in the newspaper reporter. And I’m going to tell you a quick story. At the Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, I went to cover snowboarding, which was making its Olympic debut. I also went for a second reason. I thought I was about to cover Canada’s first medal of those games because a Canadian named Mark Fawcett was favoured to win. There was just one problem with that. In his first run, in his first Olympics, the binding broke on Fawcett’s snowboard. His Olympics were over. In the meantime, there was this other Canadian who nobody had ever heard of, who was doing really well in the first round of the competition. In fact, I think he was leading. I remember opening the Canadian Olympic handbook, turning to his page, and finding out it was almost completely blank. It had his name, his birth date, hometown and not much else. So I called the office library from Japan, trying to get them to find out everything they could about this guy. I got a phone call back from the library. They found only one story in their vast resources. Actually, they only found one line in the story: “Ross Rebagliati of Whistler BC finished third”. That day in Japan, Rebagliati won the gold medal in snowboarding and I was so curious about this guy nobody had ever heard of winning gold that I arranged the next day to spend the entire day with him. Where he went, I went. By the end of the day, I thought I knew pretty much everything about him. Then the news came out a day later. He had tested positive for marijuana and was being stripped of his medal. That day, he was taken to a police station in a place called Nakano, and I have to tell you, in Japan being caught with marijuana is no minor crime. I got a call from somebody tipping me off that Rebagliati was being taken in for questioning and, fast as you can, I got in a cab and headed for the police station. I was the first reporter there. The Japanese, being as polite as always, not only invited me in, but offered me own desk and a place to plug in my computer. I was basically given my own work space.

Within minutes of my arrival, the rest of the world media followed suit. All the major networks. All the major newspapers and wire services arrived. All of them outside the police station standing in the cold, while I sat at my warm desk and from outside the window, others wondered how I got in. Some of them shaking their fists at me.
Rebagliati was interrogated for more than five hours that day. Once his interrogation ended, he went out, met the cameras and the reporters outside, and offered a brief two sentence update on his situation. He then went back inside. It didn’t seem worth the long wait.

But seeing me in the police station, he gestured me towards him as he walked to the back of the station. He got in to a limo - along with Canadian Olympic officials, and waved me to join him. I got into the limo, where I was given a play by play of his meeting with the police and what his plans for appealing his disqualification were. I got one big story; the rest of the world got a two sentence comment.

Why does this matter? Because reporting matters. Because source building and relationship building leads to better stories and unique stories like the one I just told you about. Because if I don’t make the connection the day after he wins his medal, I don’t come away with the story from the police station. A blogger, sitting in his basement, can’t do that. Online journalists can’t do that. A lot of times, television and radio can’t do that. Newspapers, at their best, with sharp minded editors, relying on reporters’ instincts, can still do that.

But we have to be flexible and we have to understand there is more than one way of feeding the various elements of media. The best example I can come up with was the recent bankruptcy court hearing involving the Phoenix Coyotes, Jim Balsillie, the National Hockey League and a possible move to Hamilton. Under normal circumstances, reporters would go to court and supply a story for the next day’s newspaper or newscast. But with today’s technology being what it is, a number of reporters from various publications and networks used their Blackberries to almost file a play by play to either a website, a blog or a twitter account while court was going on.

So instead of waiting for the news, consumers can keep up with the news while it’s happening. The next day, we supply the context. That’s fulfilling everybody’s needs. I believe this is just one of the creative ways we can service the information industry and we need more of them. We need, and I hate the expression, to think outside the box.

When you combine internet and newspaper, more people, not less people, are reading than ever before. We have to corral those readers. We have to re-invent ourselves,
and we have to do it with the tools that make the best journalists - with hard work and industry and effort and passion. This is a business about love - you have to love it to succeed.

I could go on and on but I’ve already taken up enough of your time. Don’t give up on newspapers. Don’t give up on us. Keep on reading.

Thank you.