So what's going on with The CR?

I was pumping gas.

And a young guy at the next pump asked a question: “So, what’s going on with the newspaper?”

Good question.

And because I’ve always believed that transparency is a virtue and that — ultimately — a newspaper doesn’t belong to its shareholders but to its readers, I figured he deserved a straight answer. So do you.

Here it is.

The newspaper business in America has never been rougher.

The combination of changing reader habits, the Internet, a weakening of community connections, a retail climate dominated by decision-makers hundreds of miles away and half a dozen other things have made it tough.

Tough doesn’t mean impossible. But it undeniably means tough.

For something like 30 years, I have preached seven ethical obligations of a newspaper. (Like any good journalist, I started with someone else’s list and added onto it.)

The list goes something like this.

A newspaper has an obligation:

•To provide the reader with an unbiased account of the events of the day.

•To provide an independent forum for public debate.

•To make it clear at all times to the reader what is news, what is opinion and what is paid advertising.

•To set an agenda for its community’s future.

•To reflect in its hiring practices the community it serves.

•To listen to its readers, their complaints, their concerns and their sensibilities.

That’s six.

The seventh is this: To survive.

It’s that last one I found myself staring at in late August of last year.

After a couple of exceptionally rough years — the Marsh bankruptcy didn’t help a bit — the company had seen its working capital diminished. We needed some outside help if we were going to meet that seventh and most important ethical obligation to our readers.

I started first by looking for potential local investors. While many expressed their heartfelt support, they also made it clear they didn’t know a doggoned thing about the newspaper business. In other words, if it happened to be tough for us, it would be even worse if they were at the helm.

Then, inevitably, I went looking for potential buyers who would be able to realize economies of scale that would quickly return the newspaper to good fiscal health. And there were a few of those worth talking to and negotiating with.

But the trouble with that phrase “economies of scale” is that it inevitably means the loss of jobs. And that was a road I did not want to go down, inevitable or not.

Finally, after a long fall and winter of struggle, we ended up with what seemed to be the best handshake deal we could come up with.

There was no 100-percent assurance that jobs would be preserved, but the deal was structured to include the company’s real estate on Main Street on the west side Portland.

That was what I figured was the best I could do to tie any new owners to the jobs at that location.

So we began to move beyond a handshake into legal documents, and that got complicated quickly.

The potential buyer, understandably, wanted to make sure that there were no environmental problems related to the property. That meant having a Phase 1 assessment conducted.

But when the Phase 1 report came back, its focus on a number of off-site issues — dry cleaners down the block, former underground storage tanks in the neighborhood — caused understandable alarm on the part of the potential buyer.

He insisted upon a Phase 2 assessment, which was not only expensive on our part but also a leap into the unknown. While I didn’t believe there were any environmental issues, it would take a Phase 2 to prove me right.

And that’s about the point where this whole narrative gets a little screwy.

Driving home from a meeting with the potential buyer during which he had insisted upon a clean Phase 2 environmental assessment before going forward, I started worrying about the rest of downtown, all of most small-town business districts for that matter.

It wasn’t just our problem, I figured. It was a problem for lots of folks.

So when I got back to town, I stopped by to see Ami Huffman, the county’s community developer. I figured she ought to know that this headache was out there.

Ami had been working on the Stellar Community project, and the room where we met had dozens of sheets of paper taped to the wall with ideas and concepts and challenges written on them.

And as I was explaining my concern about Phase 2 issues in downtown neighborhoods, I looked over Ami’s shoulder.

There, on one of those countless sheets of paper, someone had identified the newspaper’s Portland real estate as the prime location for an apartment development centered around the historic Hood building.

The building may have been circled in red. It may have had arrows pointed at it. I don’t rightly remember.

What I do remember is that Ami asked: “Would you sell the real estate?”

So, here I am, working my way through a heart-breaking process to sell the newspapers that have been connected with my family for 60 years, when Ami suggests that it might be possible to sell the real estate instead.

Sell the building and adjacent lots but hold onto the business itself?

If that was the question, I said, heck yes.

And that, I said to the young fellow at the gas pump, is what’s going on at the newspaper. 

We’re hoping to sell the company’s real estate to give us a capital re-boot that will get us through these challenging times while still remaining one of a handful of locally owned daily papers in Indiana.

Will it continue to be tough? You bet it will.

The forces that have hammered us the past few years aren’t going to go away any time soon.

But would this re-boot be a game-changer? You bet it would.