MashGet

The traditional media brand scions of Time, the Washington Post and Newsweek are of diminishing import with circulation and advertising declines. Major city newspapers are disappearing like the rainforest. In the past six months, we have witnessed the closing of the Denver Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Francisco Chronicle. There is a great deal of teeth gnashing about how this came to be and mostly it is deemed that they just didn't make the transition to the web soon enough, or haven't figured out the business model, etc. All true, but fundamentally, these brands forgot what business they were in--they thought their product was the newspaper, when it was the news.