Journalists and readers concerned with the fate of the printed newspaper packed into Cubberley Auditorium last night eager to hear a panel of media executives answer a pressing question: Can newspapers survive in the new world of journalism?

“Other forms of media are usurping America’s need for a daily newspaper,” said visiting Journalism Prof. Joel Brinkley, who moderated the event and offered conventional wisdom about the withering state of the business. “They’re in trouble across the country...And those problems are more dire than most people know.

All four panelists said they thought the newspaper would survive and agreed that a healthy newspaper was important, but none claimed to know with certainty what the medium will look like decades down the road.

Google’s vice president in charge of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer ‘97 M.S. ‘99, suggested that the future of journalism may lie in the hands of MySpace and Facebook reporters, who would write first-hand reports that could be edited and aggregated by citizen journalists. The futuristic idea, which she attributed to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, drew some incredulous laughs from a mostly older audience.

“Our users want information that’s very urgent, like breaking news,” she said. “So for us it’s very important to have that information in our index, so we can include it in our products.”

The 41st annual Carlos Kelly McClatchy Memorial Symposium was sponsored by the McClatchy Company, whose CEO Gary Pruitt was a panelist last night.

“There’s a big print audience still in existence here,” Pruitt said. “That’s not the profile of a dying industry.”

An optimistic Pruitt stressed the importance of a thriving press in a democratic government.

“From the early days of our country, democracy and journalism have been partners,” he said. “The stakes are very high here.”

Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, said that newsgathering helps the people keep track of what government and institutions are doing.

“There is stuff going on out there,” he said, “and if we don’t understand it, it’s not just the newspaper industry that suffers.”

Pruitt and Keller pointed out that the newspaper industry must be willing to adapt to new technology. Pruitt reminded the audience that newspapers have survived the popularity of the telegraph, radio and television, even though analysts once warned each would harm the traditional print newspaper.

“We just need to be adaptable,” he said, citing Charles Darwin, “and we’ve clearly done that throughout history.”

“We face a wrenching transition,” Keller added, “and at the end of it our newspapers may or may not be paper, but, as the saying goes, they will still be black, white and read all over.”

Only Mayer and Pruitt stayed until the end of the event; Keller and Harry Chandler, an heir to the Chandler family fortune from The Los Angeles Times, left early to catch flights.

Chandler, whose family largely sold its stake in the Tribune Co. to billionaire Sam Zell last month, described himself as “more pessimistic than what you’ve heard.”

“The bad news is pretty clear,” he said. “The newspaper business model is pretty out of whack, and I don’t even know what a whack is. I think we’re five to 10 years away from finding where the stasis is, and there will be a lot of pain before we get there.”

Chandler also suggested media titans consider privatization of the media, outsourcing reporting jobs to India and holding editors to business benchmarks — ideas he acknowledged were highly controversial.

“Television has done this for years,” he said. “It’s called ratings, and people live by them.”

Pruitt described journalism’s “central mission” as four-fold.

“It is our duty to speak the truth about power,” he said, “hold government accountable, build community cohesion and give voice to the voiceless.”

Keller tried to soothe those who will have the wherewithal to think positively about the long term while adapting to the changing business model of the industry.

“Newspapers that resist the panic around them,” he said, “and stay true to their mission will endure.”