Some critics have ulterior motives … who’d’ve quessed?

Everybody has an ax to grind in the swirling debate about the financial future of the news media in general and newspapers in particular.

They call us ink-stained retches curmudgeons and luddites.

We call the newspapers-are-dead crowd Chicken Littles.

Randy Siegel, writing in Editor & Publisher, lays out some of the ulterior motives not so obvious on the surface for some of our more prominent critics of late. He takes a well-deserved shot at that Time magazine report on the 10 most endangered newspapers. (I had serious questions myself about the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Miami Herald being on that list.)

Here’s what he has to say about one frequent critic:

“Another prominent newspaper pundit with questionable motives is the ubiquitous Jeff Jarvis, a former magazine editor and newspaper executive who has built a lucrative cottage industry for himself as a quote-machine, author, blogger, speaker, and new-media consultant specializing in one primary area of pontification: the imminent death of newspapers and the rise of a new world order dominated by his favorite company, Google, the fawning subject of his most recent book, ‘What Would Google Do?’ In fact, if you Google ‘Jeff Jarvis and the death of newspapers,’ 74,000 articles and references pop right up.

“If any journalist on deadline needs a quote about the imminent death of newspapers, Jarvis will serve one up in a hurry. His BuzzMachine blog features columns such as ‘Newspapers are (expletive deleted)’ and ‘Hitting the coffin nail on the head for newspapers.’”

Bias is where you find it.