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The newspaper industry is experiencing the same problems that the print magazine and music industries have been going through, by the loss of revenue through the Internet competition, and not making up the difference with their own online sites.

One newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, has finally decided to tackle this head-on by aggressively making its online strategy the top priority.

Online Media Daily reporting on the story said, "O'Shea [Los Angeles Times editor James O'Shea] warned that the paper had fallen 'woefully behind' in the shift to online journalism. As an organization and a business, we are in a fight to recoup threatened revenue that finances our news-gathering."

O'Shea added that "Latimes.com will become our primary vehicle for breaking news 24 hours a day."

The good news is that O'Shea is at least finally facing the problem. The bad news, as he says, is that they are "woefully behind" the shift to online journalism.

All of the problems faced by traditional media companies hasn't come only from distruption of the industry, but in trying to grasp with their dying hands the money that already transferred to the Internet. The terrible strategy was to try to keep existing revenues up while the transition was being made. It's devastated the industries attempting to do that.

Now not only have they lost a lot of their former revenue, but are behind the curve on the new revenue that is already in play.

Online media has been increasing its revenues and aggressively pursuing the medium while traditional media kept on trying to plug the holes that were too far gone to save.

To show how far this has gone, O'Shea only used one example: the automotive industry. He said that in 2004 the print L.A. Times received $102 million in advertising from the industry, while this year the total has already dropped to $55 million.

As he said, there has been some progress by making up some of the difference online, but money is being lost far faster offline than online revenues can make up.

The lag time with the Internet is far less than it has been in former industries and times when they had a lot more time to respond. Those days are long gone.

What do they have to do? All media companies need to ferociously embrace online, tighten costs and be willing over a period of time to make less than they did before. They may never make what they did in the past. What's the alternative?

They've spent far too much money, energy and time trying to save something that is becoming extinct, rather than take short-term pain to make sure their species survives.