One of the commenters on the Tim Luckhurst piece I posted about earlier hits the nail on the head:

The model you have of your consumer’s behaviour is wrong, they aren’t using the internet as a way of reading a newspaper, they are using the internet, some of which consists of newspaper content, its a different thing. It was bad enough having to explain this in 1999, I find it a bit surprising it still needs saying in 2009.

And too much of the current discourse around content business models misses that fundamental concept.