By Joe Grimm

Some of us refer to the newsroom as “the paragraph factory.”

It’s one way of saying that we must toil to feed the beast of daily journalism.

We liked the analogy in Detroit, where gritty factory work had built the city we worked in.

In fact, though, we ink-stained wretches rarely came close to real ink anymore, much less grease or oil. The only mechanical demons we had to fear were jammed copiers or balky vending machines.

But the 24-news cycle could seem like an assembly line. In more than one exit interview, journalists told me that the paragraph factory had become a treadmill.

Like the car factories around us, newsrooms fell on hard times.

In 1988, General Motors launched an ad campaign to revive sales and expand the aging consumer base for its Oldsmobile line. The catchphrase was, “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile … this is the new generation of Olds.” William Shatner, appearing as Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, was a pitchman.

The campaign worked better for Shatner than for GM. Some blamed the ad campaign for steering Oldsmobile away from its niche as a car for successful businessmen. Oldsmobile was phased out in 2004.

Newsrooms of all kinds are trying to find the next generation. Time and Newsweek, whose average audience is in its late 50s, regularly update us about the goings-on of people that many 57-year-olds have never heard of. (I know what I am talking about.)

The magazines update younger generations, whom the publishers hope will pick up a copy, on the deaths of people for whom young people have little context. And the magazines are reaching both older and younger as the news hole shrinks.

Newspapers have lived through the era of shovelware, when we just pushed everything in print onto the Web, expecting better results. Now, though, everyone wants news immediately, not every 24 hours, and newsroom payrolls are down by one-third or more.

General Motors has survived bankruptcy and, in 2011, had its most profitable first quarter since 2000. GM still has a way to go, as analysts predict next month’s figures will show, but it no longer thinks about Oldsmobile.

Efficiency is part of GM’s road back, but the real drivers are investment in all-new products and markets. That’s where GM has found its growth, and that’s where news media will find the most promise as they retool the old paragraph factories.

And William Shatner? His encore career means he is not your father’s Captain Kirk.

Joe Grimm, a consultant and adjunct faculty member of the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, recruited for the Detroit Free Press, Knight Ridder and Gannett from 1990 until 2008. He now teaches at the Michigan State University School of Journalism. He has run the JobsPage journalism careers site at www.jobspage.com since 1996. Questions about careers? E-mail Joe for an answer.