The Rocky Mountain News is publishing its last paper this week. I didn't have to buy the paper to find this out. I read about it for free on its website. And that's the rub.

At some point soon, a bunch of Harvard academics and industry leaders will gather to put together a comprehensive case study trying to explain how the media industry imploded in the twenty-first century.

Let me save them some time and clue them in on a big factor: The media had a product that people were paying for, and they decided to give it away for free.

Yes, there are other reasons, too. Classified advertising, the backbone of the industry, dried up as sites such as Craigslist emerged. Lots of other advertising that once relied on newspapers also migrated to the Internet. Somehow, though, that seems like it may have been a fixable problem.

Ultimately, the decision by ninety-nine percent of the newspapers in the country to make their content free online will have to be looked at as one of the great business blunders of all time. And hopefully the entertainment industry is watching and learning, because they are making the same mistake.

This is not a dinosaur argument against the Internet. It's a valuable platform, and if the industry hadn't panicked in terms of how to use it, it might have become a little profit center rather than a drain sucking away their business.

Immediately after news broke about the demise of The Rocky Mountain News (I saw it on a Twitter via Facebook, of course), someone asked why they didn't just go to a web-only business model. Here's why: Because while getting rid of the paper and trees would realize immense savings, it still wouldn't be enough to cover the actual salaries of the writers and the editors who put the paper out. Lots of newspapers will tell you their websites make money. What they don't tell you is they are not putting the costs of producing content for their sites into the equation, because those costs are kept within the costs of producing the print edition.

The newspaper industry became obsessed with drawing traffic to their websites and figured that advertising dollars would more than make up for the lost revenue from readers who no longer bought the paper (at least I hope that's what they were betting, otherwise we might need a warrant to arrest publishers for assisted suicide). That was wishful thinking even in the best of economic times, and a recipe for disaster these days. It didn't help matters when the Associated Press and other wire services started giving their content away online, which certainly forced some hands.

There are those who will counter all this was inevitable because even on pay sites, people were stealing content and posting it, and this is no different than what happened to the music industry. There is a lot of truth to that. However, one has to believe that the same brilliant engineers that have made it possible for me to watch videos or read content online would eventually figure out a way to stop someone from copying it. And these days, many of us now gladly shell out cash to download songs.

The television industry is struggling with the same issues. Hulu is a great site, but I don't really think NBC would rather have people watch episodes of Saturday Night Live online vs. on TV until the ads it runs on the site cost as much as the ones it sells for the network.

Somewhere there is a solution waiting to be found. As a former reporter for a few publications that are in imminent danger of going under, I hope we don't have to wait much longer. Ultimately, the fewer voices there are in the world, the easier it is for bad things to happen. The watchdog will have no bite.

And for those who argue that bloggers and citizen journalists can pick up the slack, I leave you with a quote from former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of HBO's The Wire, David Simon: "The Internet is skimming the froth of commentary from the first-generation newsgathers...They have parasitically achieved immediacy and relevance by co-opting the debate, the humor, the rage, and the provocation that results from news product—without actually investing or committing in any serious way to the systemic acquisition of that news."

Pretty good, huh? I found it for free on the Internet.