“We’re here because the business model is broken,” said Bill Adee, who’s in charge of innovations at the Tribune, where Sam Zell has brought in a crew from Clear Channel Communications to think the biggest thoughts. “Hopefully they won’t ask journalists to fix it.”

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Moderator Dirk Johnson, an NIU journalism professor who used to cover Chicago for the New York Times, wondered at the outset, “How do we keep the fabled romance that gave us The Front Page from turning to the last page,” and the discussion that followed was tinged with an odd sort of forward-looking nostalgia. In the Front Page era, every social and economic class was served by its own daily, which cost pennies. Today isn’t that different, with an infinite array of Web sites, all free and all sure to flatter somebody’s notion of the world and how it works. The most sentimental of the panelists, Monroe Anderson of EbonyJet, recalled how much fun the newspaper business still was when he broke in at the Tribune in 1974, but when he complained that everything became “very corporate, very structured’ and “they’re looking to the bottom line,” he was describing a middle period now ending, when metro dailies resembled the local gas and water works and other utilities, except that they were unregulated and made a lot more money.

Beyond letting go are healing and serenity, and Tom McNamee, editorial page editor of the Sun-Times, a paper on the brink, seemed OK with all of it. If the papers die, he said, they die. Journalism will survive. He compared the news to popular music: “Even bands like Wilco, nobody’s buying the records, they get them free online. So what’s going to happen, music is not going to die, people still love music, there will still be bands out there making fantastic music, but they won’t make megafortunes. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a wonderful thing — the only people it’s bad for is Wilco. Same thing here. We may not all be making fortunes. Our 30 percent profit days are over. We may not survive. But you know what —  that’s our problem. Not to say that the world’s in crisis because newspapers may not survive in the form that we recognize now.”

There wasn’t much said to hearten the young professionals in the audience. One of them asked about freelance opportunities and Anderson said to talk to Slonoff. “He’s expanding and the Tribune’s shrinking.”