by: Matt Ingram | GigaOM.com

As newspaper companies like Advance Publications attempt to wean themselves away from a reliance on print — a transition that almost every mainstream publisher will likely have to emulate at some point — the full implications of this disruption are starting to become obvious. One is that a digital newspaper becomes just another online information source among thousands of others, and that kind of competition isn’t something most publishers are used to dealing with. Many newspapers also seem to have forgotten what business they are actually in, and that misunderstanding goes a long way towards explaining the rush to implement monopoly-style features like paywalls. But as Justin Fox notes at the Harvard Business Review, this kind of rear-guard action will ultimately be futile for all but a select few.