 Tom Engles figured the Tampa Times was going to fold soon after the marketing department began featuring silly caricatures of we reporters as if we were red carpet show biz personalities.
We were not personalities. Tom was.
At the time, he was about 45, much older than what editor Doyle Harvill called his "ball team". Most of us were in our early 20s, sort of sandbox kids compared to Engles, soft-spoken veteran Bob Turner and old-style editor Harvill.
Tom was a grizzly sort who could have been cast in the play and movie "Front Page", taking the part from Walter Matthau, the fellow with the face of a bloodhound. I once saw Engles end a bar fight with one punch, and he was such a wiry, pint-sized guy. Tom felt the electronic media a passing fad, including, I think, television.
When the office manager came to deliver a newfangled IBM Selectric typewriter to replace his trusty black antique Remington, Tom threw him out of his office. This story is the stuff of legends, for I had long since left the Times to work in a newswire service.
By the time I heard the yarn, the newspaper had died the death of most afternoon newspapers in an America where television and evening news broadcasts with Walter Cronkite shattered cultural reading habits. No longer was it the gauzy 1950s image of Father Knows Best reading his newspaper in the evening while smoking a pipe.
It also didn't help that the Tampa Times was the last newspaper in the country to go from five cents to a dime, thereby insuring its demise.
The newspaper business has come a long way since my first news job after college, a time when I attempt to suck like an industrial vacuum every scrap of wisdom from Tom, even the way he hunched over his typewriter and squinted at the paper before him.
He was my hero. I think about this now as my company is about to undertake marketing assignments from one of the better of Ukraine's newspapers, Segodnya. In an odd sort of way, I feel I have returned from whence I came.
Segodnya exists in a jungle of newspapers, some not worthy of the death of a single tree. Many accept payment for printing stories - what we often call black PR. Segodnya, we are told, doesn't unless it is clearly marked as an advertorial. Then, it is a business proposition, not an editorial issue.
The new publisher, Guillermo Schmitt, an Argentine, basically said to my team: You have a blank canvas - now what will you do with it?
That said, he has definite ideas of his own, as does his experienced and savvy staff. To describe Guillermo's ambition would be to divulge privileged information. It is enough to say that he has a vision, and the energy to see it through.
Often I speak on college campuses around Ukraine, and generally afterward hold a news conference to discuss one of several books I have written. In Donetsk I was asked: "Do you think newspapers will survive?" I have no doubt they will.
Worldwide, while some countries have fewer newspapers, others, like China have more than they did in the last decade.
However, I did note that a newspaper - even though the name implies a material made these days mostly from recycled fiber and called paper - was mostly a venture of the mind. The Internet will never - in the foreseeable future - make newspapers obsolete, but will provide an immediate, efficient and popular alternative to a traditional medium.
In Eastern Europe, any transition to a paper-less newspaper will take decades, probably longer than a publisher might wish, since Internet publications carry a fraction of the cost when it comes to reams of paper and barrels of ink, not to mention the cost of distribution.
Along the way, such innovations as Mojos - mobile journalists - will make both the Internet and the printed version of a newspaper better.
Mojos use their automobiles as their office, filing stories by computer for both a website and a printed newspaper. Individual desks for mojos become unnecessary and the office becomes more a clubhouse for occasional editorial meetings.
Instead of pen and notebook, the journalist uses a small computer to take notes, and a digital camera to take pictures. The cell phone becomes the glue that provides the coordination and organization. Some newspapers these days are focusing more on their web content than the printed version.
Living in Ukraine, I haven't read a printed version of the New York Times or the Washington Post in a dozen years -except during an occasional visit to those cities. However, I am a loyal on-line reader of these and other newspapers.
Folks like me are hitting the bottom line of traditional newspapers who saw, in the United States, their ad revenue shrink from 44 per cent of the total ad mix in 2004 to about 32 per cent last year. However, that ad revenue is being transferred to the newspapers' websites.
It is too easy to dismiss traditional newspapers. In countries like Ukraine, where Internet penetration does not exceed 15 per cent, paper and ink will be with us into the far-reaching future. Also, reading habits vary from country to country.
If he were alive today, my friend Tom Engles would salute a Ukrainian newspaper putting out a solid product. He loved the smell of ink and the camaraderie of the newsroom.
He wouldn't understand at all the term "mojo", thinking it, perhaps, a modern dance.
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