How old media gave away the store: Diane Francis

Excellent piece by Diane Francis on how "old media" were caught napping.

"The biggest heist in history was when newspapers and magazines allowed Google to “crawl” their content to readers, to pay nothing and to sell ads around their stories.
Google became, in other words, the ubiquitous newspaper right under the noses of proprietors who should have charged for content then.
But they didn’t because most failed to understand that Google cannibalized their business model, capturing the eyeballs and advertisers and using them as bait.
Now the old media experiments with pay walls and new media products, but audiences have switched and new readers are addicted to free online content.
The only other fix would have been the creation of an iTunes for periodicals and newspapers, as the embattled music industry grabbed.
That way readers would have paid to download stories or publications. Apple’s Steven Jobs offered this rescue to newspaper publishers, but none were willing to share with him their subscriber lists.
It was the second fatal mistake and the genie’s out of the bottle. But Google, and others, are not finished."
The full column