SEATTLE – Moan, moan, moan. Complain, complain, complain. Wallow, wallow, wallow.

This could only be a national convention of newspaper editors in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. Criticized on the left, besieged by the right, squeezed by dropping circulation and revenues, this grim group may be the most deeply depressed (and deeply depressing) subset of professionals in the nation, and their convention one of the biggest downers of the calendar, taking on the gloomy, doomed air of a gathering of blacksmiths exactly a century ago, when Henry Ford’s Model N roadster went on sale for $500.

Now part of this is the ordinary nature of the newspaper editor, who labors in a most peculiar corner of the national economy, the one where things are very good when things go very bad. You’ll notice that when the Pulitzer Prizes were announced this month, nobody won one for unearthing some secret really good news. That’s why newspaper editors are so often described as negative. Nine times out of 10 – the exception being the relocation of hundreds of new jobs to town or, in my city’s case, the return of the Super Bowl to town – the negative is news.

Still, the newsies were in a particularly bad mood here, swapping can-you-top-this stories of budget reductions, staff cuts, new pressures on news holes – and that’s before anyone mentions the relentless flood of young readers to the Internet, where some of the readers of this very column are consuming these words at this very instant without shelling out a dime.

Surely the apocalypse has arrived.

First, before I go on to debunk this wisdom, a word about the irony inherent in this crisis, which I think can be described not only as a crisis of revenues but also as a crisis of confidence. In our business we pride ourselves on the steely eyed courage and dispassionate perspective with which we record the process of change throughout our society, a process that has never occurred without dislocation, pain and heartbreak. Think of the handloom weaver of late 18th-century England.

But now the change is occurring not in some other country, or some other sector of the economy, or some other time period, but to us, right here in the United States, in our own time. We’re not up to the task our cold dispatches called for in the shoe and textile and steel and, this very year, automobile industries. We’re completely flummoxed by change and, what’s more, we’re shocked that it has happened to us. This does not reflect well on us chroniclers of change.

So the first thing we ought to do is to get a grip, to set aside the comforting conceit that we’re the center of the universe – the circulation figures are a sobering reminder of that – and get on with the business of reforming ourselves. Which, if you look at the word carefully, doesn’t necessarily mean a spiritual overhaul, but instead means a process of re-forming what we do. That process of examining how we are organized and how we do things is under way in our newsroom, and in newsrooms across the country, and we have to have the spiritual courage to let it proceed at its own pace, which by historical standards is remarkably rapid. How many of you had an interactive chat with the sports editor a decade ago?

In the meanwhile, we should remember that other industries went through this, survived and flourished. We should have the maturity to greet the difficulties in our business with perspective and regard them not as a death knell but as the challenge that brought us into this field in the first place. We’re supposed to embrace change – which, after all, is the oxygen of our business – and not resist it.

Which brings us to the real business at hand, and that is that the news business is not dying. News is not going out of fashion, or relevance, or urgency. Count the number of times someone asks you “What’s new?” and you’ll see what I mean. People crave news, even the negative stuff we peddle with such somber and self-righteous pride, and they’re going to care about it next year and in the next generation and in the next century. You don’t need a Ford Foundation study to tell us what is palpably true. (We’re the ones who are supposed to be the trained observers of society, so how did this fundamental truth evade us?)

People in the future will get news in a variety of ways, some different from the way they get it now. That sentence could have been typed in the early 20th century, before radio, and in the late 1940s, as television was emerging, and today. No big deal. News is about facts and their dissemination, and if the editors listened carefully, they would have heard Gary B. Pruitt, who heads the McClatchy Co. (which just bought the Knight-Ridder chain), say that “we provide content that no one else has, and no one else can do, and that is our future.” They also would have heard William Dean Singleton, who heads the MediaNews Group in Denver and will be the first to tell you he is no incurable romantic, say that his company is beginning the installation of $500 million in new presses. Presses typically last 40 years.

The news business has its challenges, including high costs, distribution challenges, changing habits and new technologies. Big deal. The food industry faces the very same challenges, and so does the transportation business, and so does the entertainment industry.

People are still going to go to the movies, and are still going to travel, and are still going to eat, and they’re still going to consume news. It is one of the defining elements of our culture, and it is the indispensable element of the civic life of a nation founded on the revolutionary notion that the people – the informed people – can govern themselves. We’ll be here, in one form or another. And with luck, and some courage and perspective, the news business will be better than ever. Vastly different, but better. Read about it here first.