One of Jim Clarke’s interactions at Wednesday’s annual Great Conversations fundraiser was a fitting lead-in to the next night’s panel discussion as part of the series of community dialogue.

Clarke, a bureau chief for the Associated Press, was sitting next to a 14-year-old girl and a 60-year-old woman. The teen said she gets her news by logging onto Google and following links. The woman asked what links were and then asked if her newspaper was going to disappear. This exchange is a prime example of the changing industry, he said.

Whether print media is passé was one of the questions raised in the panel discussion Thursday night headed by Clarke, who is bureau chief for Montana, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado; Peggy Kuhr, dean of the University of Montana School of Journalism; and John Doran, editor of the Independent Record. The dialogue about how news is best delivered was the last of this year’s Great Conversations events organized by the Helena Education Foundation.

The majority of the about 50 people in the audience at Carroll College said their most significant source of news is the newspaper in both online and print forms. About a handful said they get their news from radio and television.

Issues the newspaper industry is facing include the unauthorized use of news content and that hyper-availability of news content, Clarke said. The news audience is growing, but then it disperses, he said, with 44 percent of news consumers using Google News to scan headlines.

The solutions are to protect the content so it stays with its rightful owner, point people to authoritative news sources and pay to create products and systems that maximize revenue for content, Clarke said.

Another issue is the availability of news online for free. Doran said most sources have lost their ability to charge for online content because they have been offering it free of charge for so many years. Those readers the papers have recently gained could be lost if the papers began charging for online content.

Doran said there is a misconception that fewer people are reading the news. While there is a decline in revenue, the number of readers is increasing, with the Independent Record reaching 79 percent of its market each week, Doran said.

“Small-market papers are the model. They always have been and always will be,” he said.

When asked what the face of news will look like in 10 years, Clarke held up his iPhone, and said that in about a year a similar tablet device will be unveiled. This new device will be the “iPod of news,” he said. Print newspapers will become a secondary product and ultimately obsolete he said.

Doran agreed with the shift to technology but said that due to public demand, the print product will not go away completely with the flip to online.

Kuhr said another shift is the spreading of information throughout the day versus the morning paper or the evening news.

“We all get our information from different sources in bits and pieces all day long,” she said.

Clarke agreed and said that search engines facilitate this.

“The whole world is our oyster information-wise,” he said.

There is not a decrease in journalism majors nationwide, Kuhr said. Not only are students still interested in journalism, but they also are more prone to read the news than previous generations, she said.

At the university, they must balance the honoring of tradition with the embracing of technology. The curriculum is changing to teach journalism students to write, photograph and videotape.

“In the real world, they’re going to have to do a little bit of everything,” Kuhr said.

Reporter Angela Brandt: 447-4078 or angela.brandt@helenair.com