We knew what he meant. Many newspapers around the country were either dropping dead outright or, worse, were being gobbled up by pea-brained chains. On the glummest of days, we had to agree that newspaper industry did indeed look like T. Rex with a two-pack-a-day habit.
And this was in the days before any of us had ever heard of the World Wide Web.
I thought of the dinosaur ranch recently when I read of the demise of the New Century Network, an online venture begun in 1995 by nine media giants. They had hoped to use it to stake their claim on the Internet and fight off competition that might arise there.
The project took its last, inglorious breath Mar. 10, less than a year after a big kickoff party at the Newspaper Association of America convention.
The party had featured a thousand bottles of champagne bearing the label, "New Century Network: The Collective Intelligence of America's Newspapers." The slogan drew guffaws but little else. Attendance at the party was less than 100. Anytime journalists don't show up for free booze and free food, there's something seriously wrong.
In retrospect, it appears the venture was short on "collective," and maybe on "intelligence." The network began to fall apart almost from the start, with several major players - including The Washington Post and the Tribune Co. - eventually wandering off to set up competing Web projects.
It appears the dinosaurs didn't adjust well to the Web. The participants reportedly bickered among themselves over how to divvy up what little advertising revenue there was. Publishers were also said to lack a commitment to making the online version competitive with TV news by posting stories on the Web before they appeared in the morning paper.
Numerous newspapers, large and small, have made the leap onto the Web and done quite well, of course. Whether they're making sufficient profits is hard to say, but the quality is there in many cases - and that's going to be necessary if readers and advertisers are ever going to show up. New Century Network apparently lacked that degree of quality.
With the network's participants walking off in defeat, I'm intrigued - and I'm sure many other reporters and editors are too - by the possibility that the Web might someday change the newspaper industry in ways that the chains and media conglomerates can't control.
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