It’s foolish to think that times aren’t changing. Why can’t the traditional media outlets accept that? More to the point, why are the newspapers hanging onto their outdated model? It is really that they are too scared to move? Too short sighted? Perhaps not.

It’s more likely that they have missed the memo: the delivery of news is changing. The content isn’t. To look at it another way, the cable news networks aren’t complaining about how the Internet is killing their business model. They are “broadcasting” their content online all the time, often linked to AP wire stories or simply transcripts of their video feeds. They show their local ads, as they would on local television, to the internet at large. (I’m sure their advertisers hate that. All those extra eyeballs…)

So what’s wrong with the newspaper? Why can’t they adapt? Broadcasting text across the Internet is what the World Wide Web was originally built for. There aren’t the costs of publication and distribution in physical forms. So why is this so hard for them? That they can’t make money when they are showing a whole bunch of ads on every page – even the navigation pages that are devoid of article content? That they can’t make money when doing that – and further breaking up articles to run on multiple pages to force even more ad views?

They seem to have a rather strong sense of contempt for their readers. They never recovered from that little incident in 1990 when CNN lucked into a live video feed of the first Persian Gulf war. They never bothered to change anything about their business model, and 10 years later, when the Internet really took off, they ignored it. Now, 20 years after they lost the fight, they are complaining that people are linking to their content.

Get real. Savvy consumers of the news now live in RSS readers where blogs (like this one) get equal time with twitter bots and Facebook status updates. Most savvy consumers now digest hundreds of news articles every day. Adapt or die.