Mark Zieman is editor and vice president of The Kansas City (Mo.) Star.

Last year, The Kansas City (MO.) Star warily welcomed our third owner in 10 years. While McClatchy was by all accounts a respected newspaper company, our nerves were still a bit shot.

An investor we had never heard of had emerged from Florida to checkmate our old employer in just 13 days – from the time Bruce Sherman publicly urged Knight Ridder to sell the company until corporate officials conceded to an auction.

Only months after buying us, McClatchy sold off its largest newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, primarily because it had declined in value so sharply that they could garner a huge tax benefit to help pay down their debt.

Financially, it all made perfect sense. Yet nobody ever cheers when they hear that.

So early this year I decided it was time to address my staff. Many sources learn too late that the best way to disarm journalists is to tell the truth, preferably with as much gory detail as possible. So I queued up a presentation inspired by George A. Romero.

My first slide featured a mushroom cloud. Next came flaming hell fire, beneath a Newsweek quote about newspapers heading for the trash heap. We talked about disintermediation, disruptive change, mature life cycles and the threat of substitution.

I threw in a slide of headstones, engraved with the names of great American newspapers that are losing money. For an extra dose of terror, I moved on to outsourcing, displaying the Reuters story of the Star Tribune sale, with its tagline: “Additional reporting by Shailesh Kuber in Bangalore.”

By then, even my most upbeat staffers had adopted a dazed and despondent look, like you get from hearing a loved one has died or by reading too much Romenesko.

So we quickly moved on to solutions. Here in the Midwest we’re hardy, practical folk. People who, as Tolkien said of hobbits, don’t need hope “as long as despair could be postponed.”

How do you postpone despair? I showed a drawing I had made, to much laughter, of a newsroom stuck in the bottom of a mine shaft after a cave-in. The air (symbolizing print revenues) was running out, but the rescue drill (symbolizing online revenues) was on the way. “If you knew you had 3 hours left of air,” I asked my staff, “and the drill would arrive in 3 hours and 5 minutes, what would you do?”

Some joked that they would smother their neighbor. But most agreed you’d probably do nothing – breathe slowly, reduce your efforts as much as possible until help arrived.

But what if the rescue drill would take three days? What if, as one analyst predicted, it would take decades for online revenue to make up even half of newspaper revenues?

Immediately the room became more urgent. Everything became clearer. You had to conserve – or produce – more air, or you had to dramatically speed up the drill. We talked about ways to do both.

Luckily our new print redesign was a hit – readership had stabilized, we added more women readers, customer perception had improved. More “air.” But we agreed we must do more. We could use our new presses to grow niche products or boost commercial printing. We could increase efficiency and exploit new technology to cut costs.

Online ideas came even faster. After the presentation, we formed eight committees to revamp our Web site. They’ve already suggested dozens of improvements. We’re now posting more than 300 local breaking news items weekly, up 73 percent from last year. Local online users have soared as a result.

This is not an advice column. I can’t predict the future. But a staff of committed journalists is a powerful force of nature. They can clean up a corrupt housing agency in Miami, expose back-dated stock options among CEOs or even remove a president from office.

I believe that if you ask for their help and tell them the truth, they can also save your newspaper. *