This is the second time I've been to California as an adult, and I get it. I get why people abandon the right coast for the left, leave the crowded Industrial East for the crowded Information Age West. I get the weather, and the scenery, and the youth, and the sense of possibility. For 150 years, Americans have been going west to embrace the new — or at least escape the old.

Driving the point home is a monumental stained-glass window in the rococo main sanctuary of Sherith Israel, a Reform temple that survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The window shows Moses and either Joshua or Aaron on their way to Sinai. Look closely, though, and that's no Wilderness of Zin in the background; it's El Capitan, the towering cliff in the Yosemite Valley. The 200 families who founded the synagogue weren't turning their back on tradition; the window is a midrash on both the Jewish and the California dream.

I'm not a risk-taker, and my dreams tend to involve garden fences and comfy chairs. I get the California thing but somehow believe that people who are constantly engaged in self-invention are simply too lazy to just sit still.

Bad thinking, as I'm learning at the annual conference of the American Jewish Press Association. These meetings tend to be tinged with anxiety, but this year there was an acute sense that unless we keep pace with changing technology and face the aging of our readership, we'll all soon go the way of the telegram and the rotary phone. The most intently followed sessions involved colleagues who are trying to harness the Web — in this regard, Jewish newspapers, including our own, tend to be perhaps years behind the curve. Another panel featured representatives of organizations that target teens and college-age students. When a few of the actual 20-somethings in the audience were asked to respond, we hung on their words like investors at a talk by Warren Buffet.

The most useful session was given by Rob Buttry, who is associated with a project named Newspaper Next. Buttry is helping newspapers move beyond the printed page, and when I say his presentation was useful, I mean useful in the way a therapist helps surface the things you knew to be true but were afraid to admit to yourself.

Buttry showed us charts depicting the at first steady and now precipitous decline in newspaper readership among folks under the age of 35 (and worse, the meager rates among people 35-55, dispelling the wishful thinking that young people will become newspaper readers once they settle down).

As for where these disappearing audiences are turning, Buttry, quoting the management guru Clayton Christensen, spoke of "disruptive innovations." These are the kinds of new approaches or technologies that, in layman's terms, bite established businesses in the tuches. Whether you are a telephone company or a newspaper or a Jewish fund-raising organization, your traditional business model tends to blind you to the new and different possibilities out there. Big phone companies didn't see the immediate potential in mobile phones; Sony was stuck with a music recording business and was beaten at its own game when Apple scored with the iPod.

In the new newspaper business, the obvious disruptive innovation is the Internet itself and all it means in terms of delivering news, classified advertising, stock tables, weather — you name it. But Buttry wanted the newspaper people in the room to stop thinking about their businesses as weekly newspapers and start thinking about a "portfolio of products." Also, we should stop thinking about "readers" and think about "audiences and participants." Newspapers won't survive on the Internet — and perhaps anywhere else — unless they think about new "jobs" that can be done on-line that can't be done in newsprint.

He posted some examples from the mainstream press. One paper lets you find news and businesses by zip code — local news at the extreme. Another is creating a social networking site for working moms. A third is establishing "databases" of everything a reader might need, from housing prices to municipal salaries to school rankings.

What "jobs" might this newspaper accomplish for its audience of participants if we got the Internet right? Perhaps a version of one newspaper's marriage announcements, which includes a link to the happy couple's bridal registry. Or a really complete community calendar, with options for letting any group, large or small, post and update its own listings — and a "news" report, with photos, after the fact.

On the last day of the conference, I passed a crowd of mostly young people lined up on San Francisco's Stockton Street. Some looked as if they had been camping out there for days, and they had: June 29 was the release date of the Apple iPhone, and the folks were clamoring to be the first among what Apple hopes one day will be 100 million people to own the multitasking gadget.

The core of this newspaper's readership, even more so than that of most other newspapers, is a loyal but graying base of proudly Jewish readers. Their newspaper reading, like their Jewish engagement, is instinctual and habitual. It is neither for their children. The elders have seen the Promised Land. But it will take a new generation to take new risks to lead the people into it.