Deadlines focus thinking. With one hour’s notice last Friday, I appeared on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s show Think Out Loud. The topic was The Oregonian and its management’s widely circulated memo that will lead to drastic reduction in the size of the newspaper’s reporting corps. Rather than simply treat this as a Portland matter, OPB sought a newspaper voice from outside Portland.

Dying newspapers have become a cliche. People repeat conventional wisdom, which may or may not be true.

It is true that The Oregonian is going through a major change. It has already ceased to circulate widely in Eastern Oregon or do home delivery in a metropolitan market as close as Eugene. In the North Coast market, the Portland daily has raised its prices markedly.

The problem with conventional wisdom (CW) is that it leaves out the human element. For instance, the CW is that community papers will survive while metropolitan dailies are doomed. The CW also proclaims that the Internet dooms all newspapers to eventual oblivion.

I’m not sure that all of that CW will come to pass. It omits the role of imagination and initiative.

The Daily Astorian is enjoying a four-month trend of subscribers growth. That is because we’ve had an effective sales effort. It is also because we have not stinted on our news-gathering resources. I surprised a Portland friend last Saturday when I told him that we had not laid off newsroom personnel during this recession.

My Portland friend is a big thinker. That is, he looks for megatrends and builds his expectations accordingly. That also is the kind of thinking that has governed our economy. Look for the big-market opening, make a massive killing and cash your chips. People who see the world that way have no clue what most of us do. They have no understanding of the day-in and day-out of running a small or medium-sized business. For instance, the truth of small newspapers is that we earn our advertising revenue every day of the week by selling to myriad customers. Metropolitan papers have for decades relied on major advertisers. As those big advertisers die, it’s an earthquake. And the big papers are entering the brave new world without a culture of having to scrap for every advertising dollar.When I was a kid in Pendleton, The Oregonian could be Portland’s newspaper and Oregon’s newspaper. But Portland has changed – especially in the past two decades – and so has the rest of Oregon. Thus The Oregonian’s choices are more complicated. For instance, its three metropolitan counties that comprise the heart of its readership – Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington – have identities that could each fill their own newspaper.

Similarly, rural places like Astoria have changed considerably. Many Portlanders nurture the belief that fishing and logging are the staples of our economy and that we are mired in economic depression. Those two sectors are quite alive, but the North Coast economy has become much more diverse, and it contains many surprises.

Astoria has always been a big local news town. This newspaper’s former editor Fred Andrus (1947-1969) was fond of saying that you only had to open a window and the news flowed in. But nowadays our news diet contains many elements that are relatively new to these parts. In other words, we have things going on in our region that did not in Andrus’ day, and we have a new crop of arrivals who are bringing this region new commercial and retail ventures, new perspective and new investment capital.

In the simplest terms, if you brought back from the dead a few of Astoria’s prominent professionals who left us just 10 or 20 years ago, they wouldn’t recognize the place.The Oregonian lacks writers with a following. If Steve Duin left the paper, I would lose my main (and perhaps last) reason for reading The O. Anna Griffin has established a compelling identity and style.

Newspapers will survive if they grab readers’ attention. And that gets to the dirty little secret of our industry. Many of our publicly-traded newspaper companies, which enjoyed profit margins approaching 40 percent, publish newspapers that are mediocre to inferior.

– S.A.F.