Could newspapers have saved themselves?

If you hang around in the news media business long enough, you'll hear a certain lament about the last 15 years. It usually comes in a couple of layers:
If only news organizations had banded together to pool their precious content on the web.
If only they had started charging for their stuff right from dawn of the Internet.

Then, the thinking goes, darkness wouldn't have fallen on the industry. That argument surfaced just last week via James O’Shea, author of the new book The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers. A former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune and former editor in chief of the Los Angeles Times, O’Shea told the New York Times, “None of this had to happen.” His book contains this riff: “The Internet and declining circulations didn't kill newspapers, any more than long stories, skimpy attention spans, or arrogant journalists did. What is killing a system that brings reliably edited news and information to readers’ doorsteps every morning for less than the cost of a cup of coffee is the way that the people who run the industry have reacted to those forces.”

Contrary to popular mythology, it’s not as if they didn't try. As O’Shea outlines in his book, nine newspaper companies in the mid-’90s joined forces to create the New Century Network (NCN). If the title sounded evangelistic, perhaps that’s because it was: The papers were trying to bring about a new day, one where all their goodies would be packaged nicely and sold for reasonable prices to online readers.