The other shoe

I hadn't written about the impending Knight Ridder sale because it was so unsettlingly uncertain. What would I say? Better to wait until the sale, collect my thoughts and then share my observations. Well, now the sale has happened, and things are as uncertain as ever, at least for some of us. McClatchy Co. has bought the company but plans to sell off 12 of the newspapers, including The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne. We will have a new owner at some point, but we don't know who it will be and what that will mean for us or the newspaper. I feel a little bit like a kid whose parents divorce, having people ask me questions about what went wrong that I don't know the answers to and wondering how my new stepparents might change my life.

I've been reading stories about the sale since yesterday morning, and they quote KR Chairman Tony Ridder saying things like "the transaction represents an excellent outcome for shareholders." They throw around phrases like "corporate level redundancies" and "cost synergies" and "longstanding acquisition and operation strategies," and it might as well be a foreign language. What does any of this have to do with journalism? I wonder. Where's the part about newspapers full of people who like to find out things and tell them to other people?

When I was a sophomore at Central High School, a friend who knew I liked to write talked me into joining the staff of the Spotlight. My first assignment was to attend the Spanish Club, of which I was a member, and write about it. When I saw the story in print -- just a few paragraphs -- knowing I had captured something and frozen it in time, I was thrilled. And when my friends and classmates came up to me and told me they had seen it, I was hooked. I had found my place in the world. I could be where other people weren't and show it to them. I could be the first to know and pass it along. I was someone who helped tell people at Central High School what it meant being at Central High School at that particular point in our shared history. Little did I know that all this time later, I'd be trying to peer through the corporate fog to see if there was something left of what I'd started out to do.

I remember another newspaper some years ago, in another corner of this state. I was there for eight years, and two of them were pure magic. We happened to accumulate a small group of young firebrands -- most of us were in our late 20s to early 30s -- who were passionate about the mission they felt connected to. Some were enthralled by the sheer joy of journalistic story telling; some got caught up in the idea of what the newspaper was becoming, so propelled by our collecive zeal that it was more than the sum of its parts; some loved the town and what we believed we were doing for it. For that brief span, we tore that town apart and put it back together again, exploring its hidden corners and exposing its secrets and shouting out its triumphs. Some people who lived there hated us, because we were upsetting the natural order of things. Some people loved us, for the same reason. Nobody ignored us. It was impossible to read that newspaper for those two years and not understand what it was like to live in that particular town at that particular moment in history. We froze time and loved the experience, and each other for being a part of it. It's the kind of job experience that transcends the work itself; people who have had that cherish it forever.

There are undoubtedly newspapers where that is happening today, where a group of journalists and a city interact that way, but I suspect not many. Newspapers are tired these days, and the people who work at them are unsettled, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Do people still need us? What do we give them that they can't get somewhere else faster? Why should they wait around for "the news cycle" to be delivered to their doors every 24 hours when the digital world is at their fingertips instantaneously? Doesn't anybody love us anymore?

Where that shoe drops, I think, matters to Fort Wayne as much as it matters to those of us in the news business. Whoever buys The News-Sentinel will also be buying Fort Wayne Newspapers, which means a 75 percent interest in The Journal Gazette. How Fort Wayne is talked to about itself on the printed page will be determined in the next few months.

If that's just a matter of news and information -- what the City Council is doing and where the best grocery bargains are and how the Komets and Wizards are doing -- perhaps it won't matter to you, and it probably shouldn't. You can get that stuff in any number of ways. But a good newspaper, when the magic is there, does more than tell you stuff. It accumulates people who really look at a place and come to a collective vision about it and try to share it. That vision -- of what it is like to like in a particular place in a particular time -- is something you can't get from TV or radio or blogs.

It's hard to say if either newspaper provides that vision today. That depends a lot on the particular accumulation of people we have at any given time. There's no formula, but there needs to be the right mix of oldtimers who know the city and journalistic traditions and brash kids who challenge old habits and look at a city with fresh eyes, and there needs to be a catalyst or two, special people who can make those journalists realize they can be more than the sum of their individual efforts. It also depends on how those who pick up the newspapers respond to the journalists' effort. It's fine if they both love it and hate it as long as they pay attention to it and, in the process, appreciate and understand Fort Wayne a little bit better. I like to think that every time someone picks up a newspaper, there is an opportunity to discover the magic of shared values defined by a common narrative.

I do know such magic is possible, because I've been a part of it. And if the potential for it passes from our midst, we will have lost something irreplaceable. So whenever the new owner of The News-Sentinel and Fort Wayne Newspapers is known, we should understand that its directors and shareholders are going to worry about things like corporate redundancies and cost synergies. But we -- print journalists and newspaper readers alike -- need to focus on what matters to this particular place in this particular time.

Fort Wayne needs to be taken apart periodically and put back together by people who have a passion for what they are doing and a love for the reason they're doing it. I know a newspaper can do that. Or at least it once could. If a newspaper doesn't, I don't know what other institution is ready to step up.

UPDATE: Julie Inskeep of The Journal Gazette called and ask me to clarify my statement that whoever buys The News-Sentinel "will also be buying Fort Wayne Newspapers, which means a 75 percent interest in The Journal Gazette." What will be bought is The News-Sentinel, News-Publishing and a 75 percent interest in Fort Wayne Newspapers, which means 75 percent of the profit stream from both newspapers. The Journal Gazette will continue to be completely locally owned, and I apologize if I made it seem otherwise.

UPDATE 2: I haven't linked to any of the "business" stories about the KR sale, because they're all about the same, and you know the most important details anyway. I find the personal reactions more interesting. A columnist for the Akron paper, another one of the 12 McClatchy will sell off, shares my view of what a newspaper should be:

I've never felt any particular relationship to the ``newspaper industry.'' My only meaningful goal early in my career was to write for the Akron Beacon Journal, which had been part of my daily life since I learned how to read.

The day I was hired here in 1994 ranks in the top five best days of my life. And the reason for that is just as valid for you as a reader as it is for me as an employee.

As a lifelong reader of this paper, I don't think of the Akron Beacon Journal as a ``commodity.'' I think of it as a fundamental part of this community. My pride for the past 11 years has not been in working for the Knight Ridder corporation, or even the Beacon Journal Publishing Co.

It has been in contributing to the same institution that for all my life has told me all the stories of where I live and, to a great extent, who I am.

I am an Akronite, and I couldn't understand what that means without the Akron Beacon Journal. I suspect many of you feel the same way.

This paper unites us. It helps us define ourselves in a larger sense. It puts our shared experience into words.

I understand what he means about a lifelong connection. My family moved to Fort Wayne when I was 12, and the first thing I ever did for money here was help a neighborhood kid deliver the evening paper. I seem to remember I got about $3 a week for the effort. All the times I was away from Fort Wayne -- in college, the military, off working in another city -- my parents still took The News-Sentinel, and reading whatever back issues they had around was always part of my ritual catching up when I visited. A large part of what I think and feel about Fort Wayne was shaped by the vision this newspaper has had of the city.