What the Great Depression and two World Wars could not humble, we’re now supposed to believe has been brought to its knees by fibre optic cable and hi-speed Internet access? The former Bush Administration is not the only group guilty of revisionist history. Newspapers, magazines and book publishers die off weekly by the dozens globally because their business model never, ever changed.

Like lemmings falling to the sea, they borrowed heavily or were bought-out/merged in spectacularly leveraged deals. Although many could survive the current difficult times on earnings from operations, their crushing debt load is killing them. Add in a deep recession killing off their main advertising sources, mixed with their proud mantra “we do not, inn-o-vate!” and you have a perfect media storm. And they are in the eye of it, feeling safe, but knowing one step either way means certain death.

Tucson Arizona’s Citizen escaped for another week as a buyer was sought. The P-I (Post-Intelligencer), Seattle’s only daily newspaper, shed 90% of its jobs and the 10% remaining were forced to throw out their contracts (are you listening AIG?) and accept less money and health benefits to keep their job and become an online only paper. The Rocky Mountain News died two weeks ago. The San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe and New York Times are bleeding millions in cash weekly and are all on life support systems.

This week, in a sign of some attempted sanity, Time Inc. CEO, Ann Moore announced they would soon offer a ‘for pay’ subscription to Time and People’s online magazines. What confused me was when and why they stopped. For 10-years I’ve subscribed to Time Europe and thought the only way one could access their database was as a subscriber.

At some point though they bowed to the pressure for free, instant news. Once that genie was out of the bottle for free, zero, zip… it was game over financially as tons of great content was always available online. Many news organisations, like this one, would gladly pay a small amount for their feed, with reciprocal re-publishing rights. But copyright laws written for paper have not kept up digitally and newspapers got arrogant and greedy. Nothing could be republished anywhere without permission, so they owned something even they could not properly sell.

With two generations growing up thinking news, music, movies and video should never be paid for, we have unworkable business models across the Web. The argument has always been that since the Internet is such a niche vehicle others will find the same news elsewhere for free. And therein lies the rub.

The glut of news and blogs available for free on the Web scooping their news created a category five hurricane and one can now see how steep a climb back it will be.

Gutenberg discovered movable lead type around 1440 and many newspaper critics say that was the last real print innovation. Newspapers cling to the intellectual high ground and the same editorial model used for the last 300 years, desperately hoping the world will revert back to the ‘good old days.’ Einstein said doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity and it’s also a losing business strategy.

As editorial intellectual arrogance grew, newspeople became entrenched and unaccountable to anyone. When other news sources brought news as it happened, newspapers stuck rigidly to their time-bound deadlines and limitations. Newsroom schedules rarely varied. You could count on clockwork editorial meetings, assignment meetings, and time deadlines based on firing up giant printing presses in time to deliver to stacks of paper to a fleet of trucks and distribute them to newsstands across the city. As newspapers shrank in physical size, news staff and advertising inches, they did nothing to replace or change it.

Well they did make one “innovation.” When forced to, they ran like bleating sheep to create a Web page. There they thought the answer was to dump the entire paper’s article content online (because so few people actually used their site back then) and it remains the step child. They often just throw in web ads to big print advertisers for free. The Web versions run the gamut from pretty good to awful. Many have no photos and are unwilling to pay for bandwidth to put video online. It’s just a raw data dump of the daily paper’s articles.

As consumers embraced new technology (Blackberry, RSS Feeds, Twitter, etc.) they very slowly realised they were cannibalising their own business because they often had to put ‘breaking news’ on the website in advance (gasp!) of it appearing in the paper and ink edition.

Staff cuts have been so brutal they force those who remain to rip stories from wire services and reproduce them in whole cloth as they originally ran on the wire. Original local news is vanishing without a trace and most are wondering who will honestly and objectively report scandal in local government to keep them honest?

The days of Woodward and Bernstein dogging the Watergate story in ’72-’73 seem quaint history now. Don’t count out newspapers but they need to learn from those they disdain the most, the so-called ‘pajama blogger revolution’ like us.

As a dear friend once said, “be careful whose toes you trod upon on your way up the ladder, they may connected to the a** you may have to kiss on your way back down.” Alas, they will never learn.