Did newspapers give too much away too fast? Would the beauty of things online be ruined if we required a subscription to our favorite local and national news sites?

We have a new printing press and it’s called WordPress, Blogger, Typad, Movable Type, etc. etc. Where there are economies of scale there are new business models and there is change. But, should newspapers have been more careful in how they dealt with the demand for newsI’ve read a few books that say that newspapers’ biggest mistake was when they failed to acknowledge the internet as a new industry, a product and service that wouldn’t just compliment what they were already doing, it would cannibalize and eat away at their pages.