You can still occasionally find a veteran journalism type who will talk on and on about The Good Old Days of newsrooms, when the places were filled with people invariably described as “colorful characters” and Everything Was Better. You can easily locate these people because they’re the gripe-y ones in any roomful of journalism types today.

I’m here to tell you that the same people always complained Back In The Day, too. And complained. And complained. They claimed to hate journalism then as much as they claim to hate it now. And they spread a certain workplace toxin then, just as they do now.

When I jumped into digital journalism in 1995 (!), one of the most compelling factors was that I knew I wouldn’t have to work with these grumps in an old-school newsroom. I had run out of patience with the overwhelming and exhausting negativism, some of it caused by genuine factors: Low pay, long hours and the constant financial struggle of so many newspapers. But a large part of it was the accepted culture: This overwhelming negativism was tolerated by management because it was just considered to be the Way Newsrooms Are, and a lot of it was spread by dead-weight employees with an incredible sense of entitlement. They despised and fought the change being brought by digital media, largely because they didn’t understand it at all and weren’t willing to learn.

I thought about this the other day when a blog post from the longstanding “Reflections of a Newsosaur” showed up in one of my news feeds. I hadn’t read that blog in a long time, mostly because the title “newsosaur” already told me all that I needed to know about its content (even though the author actually works in Silicon Valley). And sure enough, the author posted a well-researched piece noting that one in four news startups had failed since 2010, and then portrayed this as a sad development.

But this is, in fact, a fantastic result. Most industries could only dream of a five-year survival rate of 75 percent for startups. Many VCs would be utterly thrilled if the rate was, say, 33 percent. And while a third of jobs might have disappeared from newspaper newsrooms, if there’s a 75 percent survival rate in news startups…well, that’s a lot of jobs.

You have to dig to Graf Nine of the 15-graf post to get to this nugget that undermines everything above it:

Although it is painful to watch journalism entrepreneurs flame out, it is important to note that far more new businesses fail than succeed. Even in the technology world, where a handful of garage tinkerers indeed became billionaires, some 80% to 90% of all start-ups fail.

By this measure (and it may not be the best measure by any means), the startup news business is doing great. However, it’s not doing great for people who are griping, complaining and failing to update their skills the way they’d have to do in most professions. That part of the business is drying up, just as it would in almost any other truly competitive industry.

I believe people will look back on these days and see a Gold Rush era of journalism. There are risk-takers prospecting everywhere, and some of them are making some really awful messes, and many of them will fail. But some will strike it rich (and already have), and they’re going to build the infrastructure upon which the next generation of journalism rests. And this infrastructure might be beautiful.

And those old-school complainers? Many of them are gone. The days of being able to sit on your ass and gripe incessantly are over. Thank God.