Letting the genie out of the bottle

Did the newspapers hand over their franchise when they let the AP sell its material to online sites? That's the premise of a Paul Farhi article in the American Journalism Review. Sure, it's looking backwards, but sometimes that gives us the way ahead (just as Jason Bourne escaped the C.I.A. by driving his car backward off a rooftop parking lot).  In this case, AP strengthened itself financially with sales to online clients while basically killing the newspaper business. Now, it's belatedly looking at ways to put the genie back into the bottle.