This is instructive on the difference between old media and new media. From What Would Google Do?, by Jeff Jarvis:
[Old media companies] all want to control the internet because that is how they view their worlds. Listen to the rhetoric of corporate value: Companies own customers, control distribution, make exclusive deals, lock out competitors, keep trade secrets. The internet explodes all those points of control. It abhors centralization. It loves sea level and tears down barriers to entry. It despises secrecy and rewards openness. It favors collaboration over ownership. The once-powerful approach the internet with dread when they realize they cannot control it.
….
If Google thought like an old-media company — like, say, Time Inc. or Yahoo — it would have controlled content, built a wall around it, and tried to keep us inside. Instead, it opened up and put its ads anywhere, building an advertising network so vast and powerful that it is overtaking both the media and advertising industries even as it collaborates with and powers them online. There’s Google’s next virtuous circle: The more Google sends traffic to sites with its ads, the more money it makes; the more money those sites make the more content they can create for Google to organize. Google also helps those sites by giving them content and functionality: maps, widgets, search pages, YouTube videos. Google feeds the network to make the network grow.
I am surprised that old media companies have not tried to copy Google’s model — that is, creating open networks.
In sum, it comes down to create closed networks you try to control (old media), or creating and feeding open networks you don’t try to control.