The American Press Institute last week announced it will host a “crisis summit” for 50 CEO-level newspaper industry executives this coming Thursday at its Reston, Virginia, headquarters. The conference is by invitation-only, and will take place behind closed doors.

This secretive meeting “is the last thing the newspaper industry needs,” new media and journalism expert Jeff Jarvis stated on Tuesday.

“First, these are the very same proprietors of the newspaper industry's decline. What they need is not the same old executives but new people with new ideas,” Jarvis wrote in his column on SeekingAlpha. “Second, closed-door is exactly wrong. What they should be doing is asking for help, ideas, perspectives, models, worldviews, and suggestions from outside their industry. Instead, (there) will be 'a facilitated discussion of concrete steps the industry can take to reverse its declines in revenue, profit and shareholder value.' If they haven't figured out those steps by now, I'd say getting them into a room together isn't going to do it.”

James B. Shein, of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, will lead discussions at the summit, Editor & Publisher reported. The API will not allow working press to attend, and will only make information available in a report it publishes on the conference

“It's important for companies to see how far along the 'crisis curve' they've traveled, and there are concrete steps organizations can take to halt and even reverse that journey. We'll use those tools to illuminate for newspaper industry leaders the urgency of their situation, and lay out the steps they will need to take to begin the renewal process,” Shein stated in an announcement released by API last week.

Jarvis pointed out in his column that if newspaper executives “don't know by now how urgent it is, then I'd say they've failed the vision and IQ test,” and recommended the API utilise experts and innovators outside of newspapers.

Reuters quipped in its headline on the API summit that “when the going gets tough, newspapers clam up.”

Robert MacMillan stated in his MediaFile Reuters blog that apart from the irony that the executives of companies in the business of finding and reporting the truth and holding people accountable “are among the most press-averse people in the business world,” the conference is being held behind closed doors for one of two reasons: Either “they have nothing positive to say” and “no ideas how to save newspapers” or “they have some really revolutionary concept that they're not ready to lay on us yet.”