Ryan Sholin, a graduate student in the San Jose State J-school, was at Thursday night’s Commonwealth Club discussion on the future of newspapers — “Life after ink” — and he captured these comments from the panelists:

Former Merc tech columnist and more recent citizen journalism blogger Dan Gillmor: “Blog” is just a “foxy word” for “doing things ourselves.” Ninety-five percent of everything (not just blogs — everything) is crap. How do we surface the really good stuff? We need to get past the Daily Me and to the Daily We. “The Tom Paines of tomorrow are probably going to be doing it with video” and other forms that are native to the next generation of mediamakers.

Peter Appert, a Goldman Sachs analyst: The industry can’t survive without journalistic principles, but “profability is required to support good journalism.”

Joan Walsh, editor-in-chief of Salon, on whether the long form feature story is dead: No worries — when a story’s great, we put up 5000 words, and we can tell if people are reading the whole thing.

Jerry Ceppos, former Merc editor and Knight Ridder news VP: “Why shouldn’t every newspaper be famous for something? When you try to cover everything, you cover nothing very well.”