Journalists are very good at moralising about failure. Is the audience unable to appreciate quality journalism? There, there. Have journalists themselves failed the people? O Tempora, O Mores!

In business, you would call these product-centred explanations, and they are the tail that wags the dog.

Refreshing then, to see a growing media market where failure is not explained in that 19C fashion. Here’s an Indian newspaper chief telling his staff about why they’re doing badly:

In a year when the media industry has grown by nearly 25 percent, our revenues have declined by three percent. While no year is ideally suitable for letting ourselves down, this one was a particularly bad one as it coincided with, newsprint prices rising to historic highs…

Even as our revenues fell, we let our costs hit an all-time peak, our new machines took forever to become functional — they still haven’t, entirely, although we have seen some progress lately … At some point, we lost control over rising newsprint waste levels in our presses, our inventory control weakened a great deal.

You can read the full email at sans serif.