Jeff Dahn is a darn good sportswriter, and today I'm stealing from him

I don't know if I'll be able to make it to Hawkeye Downs Speedway tonight with a commitment to spend Friday afternoon at the Iowa football media day. But I'll be in there in spirit, and so should all other (remaining) Gazette sportswriters.

Hawkeye Downs is inducting Jeff Dahn into its Wall of Fame, an honor that has gone to very few media members if any.

It's an appreciation for the many years of thorough, well-written coverage Jeff gave the Downs and other racetracks, promoters and drivers over the years. It says his work was noticed and appreciated. What more could we in this business really want?

Jeff and Gazette sportswriters Jim Ecker and John Riehl were let go earlier this year because we downsized. I'd name a villain, but what would be the point even if I could find one? Life changes, businesses change, and you either adapt or ... well, you adapt.

Nonetheless, that day we lost those writers was the most unpleasant I've experienced at work in my 28 years there, and I was one of the lucky ones. I still get to do this.

Jeff loved/loves newspapers, and loved working for one. You don't get rich in this racket as a mere clerk/typist, so you better love it. Unfortunately, it stopped loving us back as much as it once did. Plenty 0f other American industries can say the same, so this is no plea for pity.

But Jeff Dahn said it better than I can in this essay he wrote for the June 3, 2008 Gazette. It's a fine piece from a fine sportswriter, and he deserves the thanks of those who honor him tonight.

His column:

We're all dinosaurs, as those of us hunkered over our laptops or PCs in The Gazette newsroom have been reminded with the subtlety of a bullhorn over the past couple of years.

Newspaper reporters and editors are really just living, breathing, hulking sauropods, plodding our way into the sunset as the Jurassic Period -- or in our case, the 21st century -- begins to collapse, at least in the way we've come to know it.

Someone told us it was a collision by a meteor or a comet that caused our demise. We laugh, knowing full well it was something much more powerful. We know the reason the print newspaper is going the way of the Apatosaurus is because of the all-knowing, all-teaching, far-reaching technological behemoth known as the The Internet.

In the March 31 edition of The New Yorker magazine, writer Eric Alterman, in an article titled "Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper", cites author Philip Meyer ("The Vanishing Newspaper") as predicting "the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody's doorstep one day in 2043."

Incredible. I'll be 86 years old in 2043 (OK, enough with the snickering, already) but I hope that son of a gun lands squarely on my stoop and I somehow have the wherewithal to bend over, scoop it up and walk down to the nearby greasy-spoon where I can shower its' pages with egg yolk and cheesy hash browns.

Because near as I can tell, the absence of a daily morning newspaper means the absence of a daily morning sports section, and as someone who grew up with a sports section -- any sports section -- tucked under my arm, that would be the ultimate crime against humanity.

I fell in love with newspapers (sports sections) as an adolescent when my mother finally stopped requiring me to attend church on Sunday mornings (the longtime elementary school teacher with a heart of gold somehow sensed my disinterest in organized religion) and allowed me to stay home with my dad and read the Sunday papers. I remember stretching out on the living room floor with The Gazette's sports pages and The Sunday Register's "Big Peach" laid out in front of me, a world of intrigue and information just waiting to be absorbed.

Yes, a baseball box score is both intriguing and informative and, in this unyielding mind, needs to be studied on newsprint, not a computer screen.

Yet print versions of the newspaper are going away. In late April, The Capitol News, a venerable afternoon daily that served Madison, Wis., alongside The State Journal for 90 years, shut down its printing presses and is publishing only online. According to a report in the New York Times, the Capitol Times' circulation had dropped from a high of about 40,000 in the 1960s to 18,000 this year.

It's a nationwide trend. As subscriptions wane and advertising revenues drop, newsrooms (sports departments) are being restructured and streamlined. Reporters write for their paper's Web site first, getting stories online hours before they will appear in the print version.

Our job in The Gazette sports department is to keep our print product interesting and relevant to meet the needs of our readers, not an easy endeavor in a world dominated by a kajillion 24-hour sports Web sites and television networks. ESPN 93, anyone?

I just hope I'll always have my newspaper. Spilling eggs, hash browns and bacon bits on the keyboard of my laptop is simply not an option.