Good evening,

I'm writing from Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, WA, at the annual Public Innovators Summit organized by The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation. Of the 50 or so participatns, I am one of only a handful of journalists and the only active editor in the commercial newspaper business. Most here are from the non-profit world, organizations dedicated to fostering democracy, protecting children and doing any number of other good things for their communities.

I came here for the most personal of reasons. I really wanted to spend some time with non-journalists whose world view is amazingly optimistic even though many work to solve the darkest problems we face. Optimism is a force multiplier and so the weekend has been a tonic. I may get back to some of the important issues discussed here, but one discussion today really connected with the reaction to my Still a Newspaperman thread.

What is the role of memory in driving needed change?

My thread drew an enormous amount of personal communication and unusually high traffic for this blog. But there was a real difference in the responses.

Personally, I heard from literally of dozens of people who connected with what I had to say, reacted to it in very personal ways and found some value in their connection to my personal memories, which really grow out of our craft's collective consciousness.

On the blog, maybe the most dominant response (aside from the pissy scolds who pop up occasionally) was a dismissal of memory as a contributor to needed change. If you go back to the responses you'll see any number of comments that say, more or less, "you can never move forward while you're stuck in the past." Or, "You are dying because you can't let go of the past." And so on.

There is a bit of irony here.

Though it may not be recognized by those who dropped in here from afar, and it may not even be recognized by those close to home, the SR is considered one of the most progressive, change oriented newsrooms in the country. We are and have been ahead of the curve on many fronts, including the transition to the digital world. It's not as if our heads have been buried in the sand or stuck in the past.

Nevertheless, is there value in memory as we move forward?

I think the question is more complicated then the old saw, "those who forget the past are doomed to relive it." The fact is we can never relive the past I was writing about, in part because it didn't exist in quite the romanticized way I described and in part because too much has happened to ever recover the old ways or ways of thinking.

We all know, I think, people who live in their memories, the opposite of living in the moment. If you live in the past, then memory is clearly an impediment to change.

Those who draw on memory to inform their decisions as they implement change are clearly using memory in a productive way.

This weekend has given me yet another perspective, and I need to think on it some more.

This blog is about having a conversation. I convene this conversation and hope those who are interested in the issues I write about will join in.

The conversation can be superficial, can be confrontational and so be off point, can be petty and distracting. I contribute to all of those things from time to time.

But it works best when people are engaged in an authentic dialogue, when they truly are engaged, trying to understand the perspective and values of others in the conversation.

To be authentic, I have to come into this space as me, who I really am. And who I am is that complex mix of values, beliefs, experiences and...memory.

My staff, I think, knows that I have a romantic view of journalism. I describe it as a calling, a spiritual calling in many ways. Those called live by a set of core values, the values of our craft that go back to the founders. (Our values are posted here in the Transparent Newsroom if you're interested.) In dealing with revolutionary, transformational change, our goal ought to be to preserve and extend the core values while eagerly changing our practices. Values endure, practices change.

That philosophy was forged in the world I described in my original post, admittedly in overly romantic terms. My early mentors firmly believed in those core values. Many were World War II veterans who came back from the war as survivors who truly believed there was a higher purpose to their lives.

As I try to deal with the changes that have happened and are about to happen, my memories of that time reinforce the beliefs and values I hope to sustain as I move forward. I can't have an authentic conversation about change without referencing my memory in some way.

One of the best things to come out of today's Public Innovators Summit was this conversation about memory. It helped me understand why, at the moment i wrote it, my little elegy was so important to me.

Now I realize this post is much more touchy-feely than my norm. But maybe some of you can describe the role of memory in your life and how it has helped or hindered you in dealing with relentless, often overwhelming change.

I'll return to the more mundane business of newspapering tomorrow.

steve