Speaking at a hotel in New York, former media baron Conrad Black criticized the media — specifically newspapers — for “collective narcissism” that has left the industry vulnerable to the onslaught of online, reports Joanna Slater for The Globe and Mail.

Slater reports:

“What journalists believe to be crowning achievements — for example, the crusading reporting on the Vietnam War and Watergate — are nothing of the sort, he said. Instead, the media’s treatments of these controversies were ‘terrible self-inflicted wounds to [its] credibility.'”

As result of these investigative pieces, “every journalist, no matter how humble or improbable, for decades imagined themselves to be a little miniature Bob Woodward. You cannot imagine how tiresome it was.”

Black offers his vision for the future of newspapers: 24-hour updates, e-mailed to subscribers who will print them out from their home computers. To get there, newspapers will have to ditch the “terrible albatrosses,” aka printing presses.