Quote of the day, from Dana Robbins, editor of The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario.

"We spend too much time thinking we're a dying industry and not enough time thinking we're an evolving industry. Why do we frame the question like, 'what's going to save newspapers?' There's a degree of fatalism that has clouded our thinking. We're not making good strategic decisions."

Robbins is known for being candid, refreshingly so. He's also the editor who said the newspaper industry doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to reinvent itself at the speed that's needed to survive.

And he's also the editor who said he'd "rather be embarrassed occasionally by what I see in our newspaper than bored."

Meet Dana Robbins, editor of a newspaper that the October issue of Editor & Publisher called a "rock star" for its radical and edgy reinvention of its newspaper.

Robbins was gracious to give me more than an hour on the phone, despite a whole lot of stress on his end with some recent shake-ups in parent company Torstar Corp., which also publishes The Toronto Star.

It's no exaggeration to say that The Hamilton Spectator has seriously redefined what a metropolitan newspaper looks like.

Some demographics: Hamilton (like most Canadian newspapers) is a 6-day-a-week operation 40 miles outside Toronto. Circulation is about 108,000 daily. It faces tremendous competition from The Toronto Star, "which dumps thousands of free newspapers into our market every day, and unfortunately, they're not trashy newspapers either."

Under the leadership of Robbins, The Spec has undergone two "revolutions," the most recent having debuted about two weeks ago.

Combined, the sweeping content and cultural changes led to some pretty radical decisions. To wit: they pretty much killed off whole sections of the paper including Business, Food and the traditional Local or Metro section.

Instead, The Spec is now a two-section paper. The A section is a "newspaper within a newspaper," says Robbins. It contains all of the day's news - the public life of the community, province, country. It includes a photo-driven feature on pages A3 and A4 called "Top of the World." Robbins describes it as a compilation of the top 20 or so international stories of the day, told in a "really literate" NPR-like radio script format.

Behind "Top of the World" is "Behind Today's News," which is all the context and analysis behind the day's headlines. For example, Wednesday's paper ran the complete transcript of a speech by Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, talking about the state of AIDS in Canada.

After the context - and we're still in the A section, now - is "Feature Read," which offers stories that make an emotional connection with Robbins. In fact his editors apparently have a 'does it make Dana cry?" test.

And then comes a local news section of mostly short stories with a heavy emphasis on nontraditional story forms like graphics, maps, transcripts. The average length of a business story is 1 1/2 inches. ("That sound you hear is me burning in effigy in my parking lot," Robbins jokes, referencing the reaction by some of his staff).

The A section ends with editorials and opinion.

All of that content is in ONE section of the paper.

Section 2 is called GO; it is "a magazine within a newspaper," and replaces the traditional Features or Lifestyles section found in most metros. Go focuses on food, health/fitness and celebrity, the latter which Robbins describes as having "no socially redeeming value."

Has it worked? It seems so. Readership numbers (Canada's primary metric measure) for 2006 aren't in yet. But in 2004, the first full year of Revolution 1, readership increased by 6.3 percent in their target demographic groups of women 25-49 with a household income above $50,000 and among infrequent-reading Baby Boomers with a household income above $50,000. Numbers in 2005 were flat, but they apparently didn't go down.

Since Revolution 2 debuted a couple weeks ago, Robbins received 550 reader comments. All but about 25 were positive. It seems the expanded, newsy A section is viewed as both "worldly" and "fun." ("That warms the cockles of my heart. There's a feeling that those two beliefs are counterintuitive.")

Robbins is blunt about their target audience: "When we started, we said, 'We're not going to look at young people at all.' The biggest thing to encourage youth readership is to make sure their parents have a paper coming into the house. But a funny thing happened, a lot of the changes we made for boomers seemed to resonate with young people like the Go section. The gap between adult consumption habits and young consumption habits is disappearing. Grazing, news customization. They're traits of all consumers."

The Spec decided to target boomers because they have a "predisposition to newspaper reading, even those who have left. Even those who don't consume newspapers believe they're important," Robbins says. And, there's an economic reason, too: "We can wring our hands about young people all we want, but the boomers control all the money in the world."

Robbins spends a lot of time looking at other newspapers and talking to American journalists at conferences and think tanks. He credits the papers in Bakersfield, Calif., Dayton, Ohio; Rockford, Ill., and Hackensack, N.J. with taking risks.

And he likes risk-takers.

"The revolution was never about content. Not a particular kind of 'right' content. It was all about building a culture that was reader-centric, that looks outside ourselves when we make decisions in stories and design. ...We've built a greater capacity for failure. Newsrooms are unforgiving of failure. You almost get no innovation. We try to move on and learn from the experience so people aren't afraid to put up their hands and do unusual things."

Will newspapers die? Here's Robbins' take.

"We'll have less of a market than we've had before. The business model is changing, but the industry is fluid and how does that make us any different than automakers, wheat growers in the Midwest? We don't need to be saved, we need to evolve. The problem is we evolve at a glacial pace. The problem is we're run by men of a certain age who aren't interested in doing anything that will hurt their pensions."

I was tempted to let that be Robbins' final sentiment, but he doesn't strike me as really being that harsh.

So I ended by asking him if his newsroom is open to the public. He answered by saying that he thinks The Spokesman-Review's webcasting of our news meetings is fascinating. "God bless you" for doing it, he says. But he's not inclined to follow just yet.

"My reservation about transparency is we spend so much time in our news meetings talking about the marketing piece that I'd be concerned that the public perception would be journalism is all about marketing. I wouldn't be willing to give up those conversations. It would sound like we're in a widget factory trying to decide which block of cheese to send out."

Clearly the guy is deranged if he's cutting business stories to 1 1/2 inches.

Kidding - sort of. But what about sports?

Sports is a separate tabloid.

Classifieds are still in a traditional broadsheet, standalone format.

It's probably worth reinforcing that the reasoning behind the formatting is that their core audience of women and Baby Boomers are apparently time-starved.

They want news and information, but they want it in easy to digest chunks.

Robbins and his staff conducted a lot of research before both redesigns of the paper. He said he likes to joke in focus groups that he knows where his readers live and what they do at night.

Their research found that men and women read the newspaper for different reasons.

Men want to know what happened, and that's enough for them. Women, apparently, want to know what happened, why it happened, and what it means.

Hence all the news and analysis in the A section, but with easy entrance and exit points.