The extremely smart and usually right Clay Shirky breaks down the newspaper problem for you. Hint: Unless they realize what business they’re actually in — which is to say, not selling paper — they’ll die. The digital world has brought changes that are unavoidably destructive to the old way of doing business as a newspaper, which depended on it being hard to duplicate and distribute information. There’s no way to undo that, and there’s absolutely no sane reason to want to.

But, as recent events have shown, no newspaper firm yet understands this, and so they continue to fail, fail again, and fail some more, all the while refusing to alter their business plans — and while this is happening, good people are being put out of work as a direct result of the failure of management vision.

Remember, the railroads weren’t broken by the automobile. They were broken by the mistaken belief they were in the railroad business. What their customers wanted was transportation; how the package moves from St Louis to Denver is completely irrelevant to the customer.