So some people in North America are beginning to think that newspapers are a bad business. They’re wrong. We work in one of the most exciting and important businesses on earth.

It’s a funny thing but ask the man in the street about television and he will tell you the TV industry is in great shape. Ask about newspapers and the impression is they’re outdated and failing.

Why the difference?

Us.

Who is spreading the bad news? Our own employees.

Every day, some media reporter or another is rejoicing in our decline, in the pages of the newspaper that pays his, or her, wages. Actually, most of them are male, because from my observation most of them are elderly failed senior journalists put out to pasture. Some have chips on their shoulders. Some are on diets to reduce their stress-related cholesterol count. Some of them may feel qualified to write about the role of modern journalism — not that this role doesn’t need to come under scrutiny — but few are qualified to write about the business of newspapers.

Imagine the scene. You’re watching the TV news, and after the commercial break (which is full of house advertising because they can’t sell enough airtime), the anchor comes back with a story about how his own TV company is in big trouble, audiences are plummeting, ad revenues are down, squillions of employees are being fired, blah, blah, blah. Think that will ever happen?  It’s inconceivable.

Why not?

Why doesn’t it happen? First, TV news editors are limited in what they can cover due to time constraints. Second, the one thing they know is that no sensible person outside the industry is the least bit interested in the travails of the television industry.

It never ceases to astonish me how media journalists, and their editors, completely misplace their own obsession with their own importance, to the complete non-interest of their readers.

I can hear the squeals of indignation: You’re trying to censor the press!

That’s not my point.

Not only are all these negative newspaper industry stories bad for our industry, they are bad journalism. They are, in fact, the epitome of irrelevant self-indulgence. Why are we allowing stories to appear in our newspapers in which only a trivial percentage of our audience is interested?

At the recent Newspaper Association of America Marketing Conference, Brian Tierney, chief executive officer and publisher of Philadelphia Media Holdings, which prints the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, put it this way: “No other industry kicks itself in the rear end more than newspapers. Nobody else even comes close. TV and radio would never do that. Newspapers magnify their own problems to their audience. We don’t talk about the good things. The conversion from print to online at newspapers is the envy of radio and TV.”

Case in point: The Telegraph in London. The newspaper has undergone an enormous transformation from yesterday’s newspaper to tomorrow’s visionary newspaper group. It has been a brilliant project journalistically and commercially.

Covering the bad news

Inevitably, there have been cuts, new recruits, changing working practices and enormous investment, including new offices, with an extraordinary, world-class newsroom.

But what was the story published by the Telegraph’s competitors? That 90 journalists had been fired. No mention was made that the company, in fact, laid off 250 people, of whom a third were journalists.

To media reporters, all that matters is their own. While the role of journalism is surely to report on all aspects of a situation — and few do it better than The Telegraph — media journalists are only interested in journalists. They fail to understand what media is actually about, and until they do they are not qualified to be reporting it.

It would be easy for you to see this column as a rant against a few reporters whose views I disagree with. Well, there ain’t many perks in this job. Journalism is under pressure culturally, commercially and technologically, and no one is a stronger supporter of the need for investment in better journalism and journalists than me.

But this issue of how we regard and report ourselves lies at the heart of our future and the barriers to future success. Our industry, from the USA to Australia, Denmark to South Africa, has witnessed enormous change.

As I’ve written before, a newsroom of 50 reporters is manageable. A news medium of 5,000 blogging participants requires a far higher level of journalistic skill and direction. And many newsrooms are rising to this challenge superbly.

Background key

The most talented media journalist I know is the media correspondent of The Economist — arguably the most successful business journal in the world with circulation having grown by 44 percent over the last four years.

The Economist famously has no bylines, so no one ever knows who writes those words. (Isn’t that an interesting counterpoint to my comments above?) But the Economist’s media reporter is worthy of my accolade not only because she is a journalist, but because she has also been a banker, and thus qualified to write about the business of newspapers. You can count her peers on the fingers of one hand. We need more of them, for the good of journalism and the good of our industry.

Yet our own people seem hell bent on bringing us down, as was the reporting about The Telegraph. Other media reporters either ignore the facts or aren’t qualified in the first place to write about the industry.

Perhaps this is why Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group, and one of our industry’s most compelling revolutionaries, commented this way at the NAA conference: “Giving ourselves a bad image is a problem. Readers don’t care what is going on in the newsroom. We over-report it. If we need to downsize newsrooms, we maybe should start with the media reporters.”