The Column: The only dinosaur on the block

Once in a while, a senior citizens group asks me to come out and talk about the news business. I show up and the first thing I ask is, “How many still get the paper delivered?”

To the extent arthritis allows, every arm goes up.

“You’re dinosaurs,” I say. “Me, too. You should have invited the Flintstones.”

Likewise, you out there in the pajamas with Newsday opened on the kitchen table next to the cup of decaf. You’re also straight out of Jurassic Park. Heads up, here comes a flying reptile. Quick, back into the cave. Looks like Tyrannosaurus means business this time.

A couple weeks ago an old Newsday pal sent me an email with a link to the latest newspaper circulation figures.

“Could this be possible???” my friend gasped, abundant question marks signaling peril.

The rundown, conducted by some British media firm, only confirmed the obvious. What corporate types call the “print product” — that’s the one not requiring wall outlets or batteries — is, like its readers, in danger of extinction.

Even the biggest New York papers — The New York Times, the Daily News, the Post, The Wall Street Journal, and, yes, your favorite Long Island paper, too — have been losing circulation for years.

There are plenty of reasons — production and delivery costs, advertising losses, technology, social media.

I was talking a few years ago to a group of college students and mentioned that, to me, the newspaper will always be the sort you can fold on the subway or use, later, to start a charcoal fire.

Holding aloft the latest edition, I showed how you could turn pages of this remarkable device, find surprises along the way, maybe even tear out a story or movie review and stick it in your pocket for future reference. Great invention.

Doesn’t glow in the dark, doesn’t play your favorite tune or show a movie on a screen the size of saltine. But it has heft, as if each headline weighed an ounce or two, as if information, itself, had measure and substance.

“Something, huh?”

You can imagine the stirring response.

“Ever seen one of these?” a kid said, holding up his cell phone. “Check it out.”

Yeah, ok, hooray for the Information Age, I get it.

But amid the splashy electronic wonders of the time, I think it’s okay to sigh over the decline of newspapers. Since 2005 a quarter of the nation’s dailies have closed, according to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and likely a third will be gone by 2025.

As papers go under, newsrooms become just more available office space to be scooped up by an insurance firm or Pilates studio.

Sad to see. Ah, the newsroom — when I came up, boy, it was something.

Even the best movie portrayals — maybe none better than the 1976 Watergate film “All the President’s Men” — don’t entirely capture the heart-pounding pleasure of the place, the mad sense of urgency as deadline approaches, what now seems the primeval clatter of upright Royals and Underwoods as reporters pounded out stories, minutes to go.

“Done?” an editor would say.

“Close,” a reporter would answer.

In downtime, the troops relaxed. There were jokes and put-downs and conversation on almost everything — poetry, politics, food, philosophy, baseball, everything. We laughed and argued and went back to work, clock ticking again.

It could be a tough place, too, the newsroom.

Once, in the old days when we still were writing on paper, I handed a story to a feared Newsday editor.

He looked at it and then me. As if to weep, he put his head on the edge of his desk.

“No Pulitzer on this one, I guess,” he said.

I took the story, went back to my desk and wrote it again.

I’m grateful for all that — the racket and the ribbing and the feared editor, too.

But we move on. Even if the medium changes, the message doesn’t. News counts no matter how you get it. Thomas Jefferson said no newspapers, no democracy. Maybe he would have been okay with hourly updates on a smart phone, too.

For me, though, the newspaper — fat, folded, filled with surprises — will always be the first choice. I get it home delivered, the only dinosaur on the block.