“What would Bob do?”

I spent a lot of time at the latest newspaper conference, thinking about my old friend Bob, who died recently.

I was only 23 years old when I started a newspaper in Las Vegas, Nevada and hired Bob Kehoe as a business consultant. Typically, I kept my own counsel. It was the roaring 1980’s; in Las Vegas, we often drank through lunch, danced until dawn and rode bicycles at breakneck speeds through the desert. I was one of the first two women allowed in the then all-male Rotary Club, and elected to the Board of the Chamber by the time I was 30; a badass woman in a badass town in a booming economy at the peak of the industry. I listened only to the wind.

In reality, I had stopped believing that adults could teach you any of the good stuff as a child and for excellent reasons:  They had tried to teach me that the good guys always win. Then in 1963, all the grown-ups tuned into their black and white TV sets and started to sob. The president had been shot, they said, and well, he died, and, yes, he was good.

I was only three years old, but my belief in a sugary moral philosophy of God and Santa Claus ended then and there. If grown-ups were this wrong about cause and effect, what else were they wrong about? I decided to follow their orders, but would no longer take advice from any of them.

This worked out fine until my newspaper starting growing, and the faster it grew, the more cash it needed. I was succeeding and going broke at the same rate.

So I hired Bob and prepared to listen to him, maybe also because he was a gentle, soft-spoken man or maybe because he had a knack for quietly getting to the heart of the matter.  

We became lifelong friends. When his own career as a consultant disappeared into the black hole Google and Facebook sucked out of the media universe, Bob got his masters in psychology. He was proud of the fat dictionary of psychological disorders he kept on a bookshelf. But if you asked a specific question, he would just answer, “normal” or “not normal.”  

After he died last month, I flew from Mexico to his memorial service in Florida. Another entrepreneurial publisher - Bob had convinced him to sell at the top of the market - flew in from Denver. No one else there had even known Bob as a newspaper guy. I wanted to tell them what had made Bob so effective as a consultant, but I could not quite put my finger on it.

One thing Bob used to say is that when you go into a troubled newspaper for the first time, whether as a consultant, owner or manager, divide the problems into two buckets, the easy stuff and the hard stuff.

Do the easy stuff first, then the hard stuff. The hard stuff is what publishers don’t want to do, because it's hard:  Hiring your own replacement, firing a friend, selling the company. Or these days: Changing the culture and up-ending the revenue model.

After the memorial service, I took the red-eye flight to Las Vegas, where we had first met, and  several hundred publishers had gathered to attend the biggest newspaper conference of the year, “the Mega.”

One speaker started out by framing the issue: U.S. newspapers have three years at worst, 13 years at best before print is finished as a revenue model.

                                                                                                                                         Many attendees were heads of newspaper chains that have swallowed hundreds of other local media more or less whole and are on their way back to some form of economic viability.

Missing at the conference were the heads of 1400 local newspapers that disappeared in the last ten years, leaving news deserts in many small towns. For the remaining smaller publishers, the solutions were often brutally complex, technically difficult and didn’t easily add up to financial survival.

Any questions? The key executive who asked the best question got a sponsored gift bag.

The smaller publishers in the room often just asked what it was they should do first.

Bob could have told them the answer. First the easy stuff. Then the hard stuff.

I had developed my own version for the young newspaper managers I had mentored through their own crisis: There are some things you can do well, I would say, and some things you can just barely do. Do them.

I suppose this is the point where, if I were coaching a young journalist, I would advise them to end the essay.

But you’ve read this far.

Bob found peace in his life after publishing. Like many of us who entered this profession driven by a mission, he never stopped asking “What is a meaningful life?” and finding his own answers.  He said he was like a retired Samurai returning to a cave on the mountain, and graciously left the fate of newspapers in the hands of a new generation.

The truth is that what has been lost today, or grown as outdated as the business model, is the very idea that journalism, along with democracy itself, is destined to prevail.

All can tell you for sure is this:  If you want the good guys to win, you have to win. And that, probably, it is going to be hard.

After the conference, I took a cab into the desert and got out to listen to the wind and touch the baked earth one more time.