From Newspaper Death Watch, in its commentary on a meeting of newspaper executives seeking to implement a paid content plan for their websites (emphasis below is mine):
The newspaper industry’s paid content debate sounds more and more like the desperate protests of the music industry when file-sharing began to dismantle its business model. The two industries have some characteristics in common. Both are mature, traditionally stable and highly profitable businesses with predictable growth and high barriers to entry. The people who gravitate to such industries excel at managing costs and limiting risk.
These are the last people you want to run operations at a time of crisis. Crisis demands innovative thinking, fast reaction times and tolerance for risk. One reason we’ve seen so little of this in the newspaper industry is that the people at the top have no capacity for making dramatic changes. The innovation that we’ve seen comes almost entirely from startups or skunkworks operations that publishers have had the sensibility to leave alone.
Innovation becomes anathema when you have had some success. You become defined by it and at the same time you become blind to everything else.
That indeed is the innovator’s dilemma. [ http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Cause-ebook/dp/B001C33QPK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1244424944&sr=8-2 ]
We’re seeing the same thing happen again and it is just repeating the same pattern.
There IS a way for the publishers of the world to cloister their content without any fear of antitrust legislation and without requiring any collusion and other perfidious acts.
I have written about it before on various blogs and at the NewspaperDeathWatch, but you might as well shout at a snake and expect a sensible answer.
But I prefer to let them die, take their business models with them, and let the world move on and get past this.