The Small Press Center concerned itself with the big press last week when the managing editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, gave a lecture titled “The Future of the New York Times.”

Ms. Abramson started off by recalling Jon Stewart’s jab at the press during the Academy Awards ceremony. In discussing “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “Capote,” he joked: “Both films are about determined journalists defying obstacles in a relentless pursuit of truth. Needless to say, both are period pieces.”

The fact is, though, that serious journalists do face subpoenas and other obstacles in their unremitting search for truth. She said there is a need for serious journalism when a presidential administration is treating the press with “open disdain” and active hostility. Major papers continue to break stories using confidential sources and the number of people “willing to spill the beans seems to be growing as they contemplate life after Bush.”

Ms. Abramson said it has become chic to predict that newspapers were going to disappear, so she offered a cautionary tale about trying to predict the future.

Her grandfather, a milliner, came from Budapest at the turn of the last century and arrived at Ellis Island. Adolph Zucker, who started a small business that became Paramount Pictures, asked her grandfather to get in on the ground floor and become an investor. Her grandfather told Zucker that moving pictures were surely a passing fancy, but ladies would always wear hats.

In her defense of print journalism, she said new technologies do not always replace the old ones and “brand names that carry authority and quality” will continue to flourish.

The mainstream press has been buffeted by the “acid rain of criticism” from the right and left. The Times, she said, has been criticized from all sides: tabloid gossip columns, “high-minded authors” of books few people read, bloggers, cable television hosts, and Times readers, the “most demanding critics of all.”

She said the newspaper business is still profitable, but the cost of “everything we do is going up faster than our revenues.” One major challenge is that younger people now expect news content to be free.

But the hunger for quality journalism is not diminishing. She distinguished the Times from many bloggers, saying, “We believe in a journalism of verification rather than assertion.”

Internet news sources – unlike bloggers – will continue to be a factor. “Google and Yahoo do have the cash to buy up a newsroom full of journalists,” she said. “They are already moving into our space.”

With algorithms that pick stories from the Internet and transmit them to one’s desktop, Google News has become the largest disseminator of news on the planet, she said.

But she doubted that large Internet companies would be the next generation of press barons.Yahoo and Google are businesses built on scale, she said, and it’s hard to imagine they would put their volume at risk in defense of principles we try to uphold. “Just look at how readily these giant companies have knuckled under” to the government in China, which has censored blogs, she said.

She said there would always be a market for quality reporting. Stories such as government eavesdropping do not “just pop up on Google News,” she said.

About the future of papers, she cited a study by University of North Carolina professor Philip Meyer, who predicted that if newspapers make no changes, they will lose their last reader in 2044.”October,” she added, to audience laughter. She also cited one press observer who wrote: “Call newspapers dinosaurs if you like, but remember that dinosaurs walked the earth for millions of years.”

Small Press Center founder Whitney North Seymour read questions submitted by the audience. One asserted that hard news was declining in the Times Sunday paper.The audience member preferred the Saturday paper, and asked whether there was a trend toward soft news. Ms. Abramson replied that it depends on one’s definition of hard news.

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POLK AND PEOPLE Long Island University held the George Polk Awards luncheon on Wednesday. The curator of the George Polk Awards, Sidney Offit said that he endeavors to enunciate his words clearly when he describes the awards to people. It seems on past occasions he has been mistaken for describing the “Jewish Pope” awards or even the “Polka” awards. Thus, “later on, we can break out in a dance,” he quipped.

gshapiro@nysun.com