Let's not pussyfoot around here. Journalists keep droning on about "the death of their profession", but they're mostly American journalists talking about the death of American journalism - which is no surprise because so much of it is just plain "bad." Too many journalists "are the real news killers" and haven't noticed that what they're doing is "passé." They've forgotten "to redefine their job description". They keep characterising news as some kind of sacred trust "when it's just a commodity." They haven't even registered the fact that "news is not interesting or valuable in its own right."

So much for Swiss neutrality, then. Michael Ringier, chairman of Switzerland's eponymous media giant, wasn't trying to win friends at the International Press Institute congress in Belgrade last week. Indeed, he made his fellow panellist, David Montgomery, the Belfast barracuda, seem a positive jelly fish by comparison. But Ringier was trying to influence people.

He has a point. It's impossible to mingle with some of America's brightest editors and publishers these days without wallowing in the gathering gloom. The Washington Post is down to a 700-strong newsroom now; once great papers are accepting small advertisements on the front page; the New York Times is turning all the long stories from its front into a single section rather than spreading them through relevant sections; and the Wall Street Journal thinks short stories are beautiful. Oh calamity! Oh come on!

America's press, on this examination, is deeply conservative and deeply caught up with its own self-image. Recession and the advance of the internet blow mist all over the battlefield. But the crucial element in its distress is just plain, old-fashioned ineptitude. Too many companies paid too high a price to gobble up competitors in the fat years and now can't service their debt mountain as times grow thinner.

'There's been a lack of compelling strategic vision and subsequent execution that would make creditors comfortable that lending to a newspaper company over the long horizon is a proposition they could be compensated appropriately for,' one influential analyst, Mike Simonton of Fitch Ratings, told Editor and Publisher a few days ago. They all insist they have a digital strategy, but cannot articulate it. But 'the margins available in the digital space will not replicate what's going on in the print space, with its high fixed costs. So how are they going to get there?'

Many big names aren't going to get there. Some of the biggest - such as the Tribune Company and McClatchy - are wilting under the pressure. The pressure to hack costs to service this debt is relentless, but hacking merely accelerates the spiral of despair. Is it journalists' fault that too little has happened, too late? In part. US papers have been slow to change. Why only now discover that readers don't carry on following extended tales from page one to page 91? Why be so keen on ubiquitous news ripped from the agencies when that also pours continually from every cable TV orifice?

Ringier is surely right that 'exclusivity' - in stories or perspective - is the only true answer in town. He's also right not to point out that his newest purchases (in Belgrade, say) have roared forward year after year because they've rejected stereotypical thinking.

But let's also give him credit for aiming at 6 per cent-plus profit margins, not the 30 per cent US benchmark needed to service those debts. If the US catches a cold today, then we all start wheezing tomorrow? Not unless we make exactly the same mistakes - and blankly walk towards the same scaffold.