The Capital Conference newspaper convention in Washington, D.C., was winding down Wednesday morning. I had closed my notebook. Then a very odd thing happened with the last question from the floor in the last session.

 

Anthony Moor, a particularly bright online editor I met two years ago at the Orlando Sentinel who has since moved on to direct interactive initiatives at the Dallas Morning News, asked a panel of four publishers the following: Can you each give an example of one of the most far-out ideas you have heard recently for editorial and/or business? Not necessarily one that you would do, just that you have heard about?

 

Silence ensued.

 

After a brief but awkward pause, Charles Pittman, senior vice president for publishing at Schurz Communications in South Bend, Ind., referred to an idea discussed a little earlier. Newspapers need to get better, he said, at placing an ad ordered late in the afternoon in the next day's paper. If we can send a man to the moon, he said, why can't we figure out a way to do that?

Pittman's fellow publishers didn't even go that far-out. Barbara Henry of The Indianapolis Star, David Hiller of the Los Angeles Times, and Elizabeth Brenner of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel all expressed versions of the thought that the industry does not need wild ideas. Extensions and improvements of what they now have going in print, online and niche ventures are the better next steps. (Maybe new things like local video advertising or serving news and ads to mobile devices, too, though the publishers did not actually say that.)

 

Henry said she didn't fancy getting into the furniture store business. I took that to be a dig at the most outside-the-box idea in the recent Newspaper Next 2.0 report -- the paper in Ogden, Utah, that has established a consignment store allowing people to sell high-end items without the hassle of responding to callers and showing the goods themselves.
 

So after countless references in this conference (as in last year's) to transformational change and an excellent panel the day before featuring CEOs from other industries who have pulled off huge makeovers, it comes down to this: The publishers can't think of anything transformational and are into incrementalism instead?

I spoke briefly afterward to Newspaper Next Managing Director Stephen Gray. He seemed equal parts stunned, disappointed and steamed. Gray said the publishers remind him of local merchants when Wal-Mart comes to town. Wal-Mart, like the Internet, changes everything. The publishers/panelists are thinking like a shoe store that responds by adding a new line of shoes, he said.

But newspapers, by analogy, have a lot more options than the shoe store, Gray added. That's the bigger point of Newspaper Next -- that an imaginative audit of the organizations' standing in the community and broad resources could spin off numerous "information utility" ventures, many of which would serve non-readers of the newspaper and its news Web site and current non-advertisers.