The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction are holding their international symposium at the Westin Harbour Castle. Surprisingly, it’s an entirely separate event from the joint gathering of the Canadian Newspaper Association and CCNA/Community Media Canada, called Ink & Beyond. Too clever by half, huh?

Then try this lede instead: Ink & Beyond was the place to be in town this morning if you wanted free pens. The ballpoint bonanza was set on every chair in the conference room — along with a complimentary reporter’s notebook, courtesy of the Canada Newswire Group. The modest exhibition hall offered custom-labelled pens in every other booth, included a booth from the Public Heath Agency of Canada, a federal agency whose pens' sealed wrapping reads "Made in China." Free hand sanitizer, too, “powered by” access: The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, just one of the companies offering solutions to help re-monetize an industry where it’s going, going — gone?

But then, where else could one discover that there’s a Hamilton-based company, Fellfab, claims to be Canada’s leading manufacturer of newspaper carrier bags? Mercifully, it’s not their core business, even though the throwback promotional material for the paper bag division features a 10-year-old paperboy and papergirl.

Some other initiatives directed at youngsters are also on display: Kidsville News, based in Fayetteville, N.C., and Kid Scoop based in Sonoma, Calif., each offering its content for local customization. Maybe the future of newspapers really was Grit, whose distributors were recruited from adverts in Richie Rich comic books.

More intriguing were free copies of Captain Lighthouse, a hyperlocal comic book produced by The Bulletin community newspaper in Lunenberg, N.S., which won an award for best in-house promotion. Torstar Syndication Services had their own booth, still in the business of The Katzenjammer Kids and the homegrown strip Between Friends, for any publication that can justify keeping the comic page intact. Oh, and there were free copies of the daily local broadsheets — not that any self-respecting hotel lobby ever lacks for those.

What’s it all good for, then? Michael Raynor, author of The Strategy Paradox and fellow for Deloitte Consulting, appeared first thing this morning to help work it out.

Raynor’s background at Harvard Business School — and disposition reminiscent of “Hoover” from the movie Animal House — makes him the polar opposite of the passive-aggressive ciphers who grow up to become newspaper managers. Quite possibly, he’s the slickest person to ever appear at a media conference — if he could achieve success with a book about success, when there were already hundreds of successful success titles out there, then why must newspapers die?

The basic rap, and accompanying PowerPoint, goes something like this: Strategic uncertainty has been ignored. That’s resulted in the implication that companies must face either mediocrity or ruin. The best resolution involves separating the process of future commitment from the coping with uncertainty.

“You don’t know the difference between success and failure,” he explains, “because you never looked at the failures.”

The initial analogies presented involve retail — nobody sets out to be stuck in the middle like a Sears store, but does it really need to be complacent? Microsoft is then held up as the evidence to the contrary.

Newspapers actually lost their ambition, argues Raynor, compared to the early 1980s when they scrambled to protect their turf from videotext delivery systems that phone and cable companies threatened to roll out into every living room. Then internet service providers like Prodigy came on the scene, and there was no drive or money left to wage war on the fringes.

That explains why the internet’s homepage became Google’s — instead of yours.

What’s the model for saving it? Salt and pepper shakers. Gene therapy. And belief in not whipping old horses a la Ben-Hur — but releasing all your hounds.

Raynor doesn’t get paid for these conference keynotes to make the executives in attendance feel worse about their business, and his speech accomplished that.

But how does a newspaper with no hounds to release — because they’ve been thrown out, never allowed in, or subordinated to the point of no return — live up to that credo? These big questions are none of the consultant’s business, literally.

A posse of Toronto Star paid interns are dutifully typing notes at the press desk — their updates are being posted at the Ink & Beyond website, but the fact that this apparently isn’t a liveblogging exercise connotes a bout of Stockholm Syndrome. The fact that this conference is for dead-tree managers naturally means the least represented demographic here falls between 25 and 54.

Google News manager of business development Josh Cohen is next on the agenda, here to explain the company’s mission to folks more likely to curse it.

Kirk LaPointe, the journeyman gadfly who now runs the Vancouver Sun, initially tries to antagonize Cohen: “Can you explain what Google doesn’t want to do?”

“We don’t see ourselves as content creators,” comes the response. “We certainly don’t see ourselves as editors.” What follows is about an hour of mildly intriguing geek gab about how they work. But a showdown it’s not.

Questions from the floor, however, provide insight into how the minds of these real-life J. Jonah Jamesons work in 2008: The older readers don’t know enough about Google, so are there plans to explain it to them in print ads? How does the company deal with the moral and ethical issues surrounding search? And does Google maintain relationships with law enforcement to help finger the bad guys?

The answers to these questions can only come from elsewhere.

LaPointe closes by asking Cohen a question he can answer: “Do you read newspapers?”

“Every day.”

“The kind with the ink on the page?”

“News is not going anywhere,” asserts the Googler. It’s his job, too.

And a lavish lunch buffet is being set up downstairs, but a sign stresses that it’s meant for the Catastrophic Loss Reduction delegates only.

Good thing Agence France-Presse’s exhibition booth were handing out free compasses — it came in handy for finding the way back out.

 

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