"And the Band Played on..."

One of the most enduring images of the sinking of the Titanic is that of the orchestra, consigned to its fate, playing sonorously as the ship slips beneath the waves.

More than once, the slow-motion demise of printed newspapers has been compared to that ill-fated vessel, whose destruction was almost certainly assured the moment it was declared "unsinkable."

But what is missing from comparing journalism's crisis to its maritime counterpart is newspaper people.

One of our most enduring, irritating, maddening and, to be sure, necessary traits is our inability to just let things happen unexamined. We ask questions, we check the answers, we look things up. Like Columbo, we pick and pick and pick until we're satisfied with the answer.

Thus the title of this blog. Had there been any newspaper people on board the Titanic, they no doubt would have run around interviewing people about how they felt, writing down the order of songs played by the orchestra, trying to "get to the bottom of this story" before the ship hit bottom -- all while others twittered, or IM'd or texted unconfirmed and unverified messages to friends and family about their fate.

I can say this with confidence because as our own titanic ship of journalism flounders on the rocks of electronic competition, a slumping economy and, dare I say it, a growing national indifference, we are devoting as much time to dissecting our apparent demise (some would say too much) as we are trying to fix it.

In fact you might say, no one is declaring newspapers to be dying more loudly than newspapers themselves, due to our strong-jawed determination to be principled and seem objective even about our own death.

One of the best examples of this tendency I've seen in a while is this post on the "Green Inc." Web page maintained by The New York Times.

Enticingly headlined, "Skip the Newspaper, Save the Planet?" the subject is the recent decision by Marriott hotels to no cease providing free newspapers to guests who don't ask for one.

Obviously a cost-cutting measure, Marriott nonetheless chose to add some green spin to the move, saying they wanted to reduce their carbon footprint since not everyone used the paper that was provided.

This is where the picking comes in.

You see, the writer, one Tom Zeller Jr., couldn't just let that one go.

And so, like so many irritating newspaper people I love, Zeller digs in.

What he finds is that yes, it takes an awful lot of carbon and an awful lot of water to print a newspaper page, not to mention the trees it destroys. He then finds that if you're reading a newspaper on-line in Sweden, where most electric power is generated by hydro-electric and nuclear power, the carbon footprint is indeed less than picking up a printed copy.

But, if you're reading elsewhere in Europe or, presumably, the U.S. where coal figures more highly into the electricity profile, once you pass the 10-minute mark on-line, the footprint starts to pass that of the printed page.

If all this sounds like a giant rationalization to insist that we, the holy journalism industry, could NEVER be part of the problem -- we're always all about the solution aren't we? -- that's because it probably is.

Doesn't make it less true, of course, but it certainly feels like CYA to me.

What we should be focusing our efforts on is figuring out how we continue to provide our vital needling, examining, professional-skeptic-function electronically, and one that continues to rely on confirmed information from reliable sources and not just opinion -- you know like this -- without spending so much time chronicling our death spiral. That's what blogs are for and they seem more than happy to do it, although what they'll blog about when we're gone is bound to be less interesting.

But that is not our way. If we just left it alone, we would be ignoring a major shift in society and we wouldn't be true to who we are and why we're in this business. To be sure, newspaper people are working on keeping us afloat. But they're also being pestered by other newspaper people, asking them annoying questions and telling them (and the world) what we may be doing wrong.

Hey we just want to know -- and to tell you.

Now, if you'll excuse me, a source told me the tuba player on the promenade deck has an interesting story to tell....