It comes down to people, like I said before. What you're suggesting is that newspapers have all these great people who should be able to cook up product ideas

It comes down to people, like I said before. What you're suggesting is that newspapers have all these great people who should be able to cook up product ideas that generate great revenue for them. If you were one of those people, would you do that for your newspaper, or would you apply to YCombinator? Let's take Jack Dorsey as a recent example. He came up with Twitter while working at Odeo. He shared the idea with the rest of Odeo and eventually Odeo was shuttered and all resources were put into growing Twitter. Now, let's imagine Jack Dorsey working at a beleaguered newspaper in Oregon, for example. First of all, it's hard to imagine, isn't it? Why would Jack Dorsey be at a newspaper instead of an SF startup? But assuming he was there and came up with Twitter the following things would likely happen: 1. Company would spend too much time evaluating the idea before deciding whether to put resources into it. 2. Company would assign a team to work on it, led by Jack. Abilities of team would vary wildly. 3. Jack's team would have to run everything through company I.T. which means hosted servers and more paperwork. 4. Jack's project would be expected to show results immediately and be commercialized swiftly, not 5 years after launch like with Twitter. 5. Newspaper company would eventually lose patience with project and pull the plug. This happens at any big company. Newspapers are no different. No sense of ownership means its hard to focus and get great things done.