This commentary originally appeared in Forbes.

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp recently threatened to cut off his media empire's pages from Google's search engine and link up with Microsoft's Bing instead. He wants to stop sites like The Huffington Post from repackaging stories from his outlets without paying for rights. He is mad, and he is letting everyone know.

Murdoch's rant is odd because he is normally so smart about the media business, as one of the few people who have recently made newspapers profitable enterprises. He shouldn't be complaining about upstarts and new technologies. He should be confronting the changing marketplace and evolving his business model. Examples abound of companies like Kodak or Wang Laboratories that failed to adapt quickly enough.

With the financial crisis shaking up industries, Murdoch's News Corp. and other companies that are threatened should focus on three things to avoid facing eventual extinction.

The first thing they should do is adapt to changing consumer tastes in defining their brands. Take The Huffington Post. It is getting more hits than traditional news Web sites like the The Washington Post ($WPO) and the Los Angeles Times.Why? Because it steals content, as Murdoch argues? No. It succeeds because it delivers what its evolving core target market wants and embraces new forms of technology. Its editors realize that people who like to see pictures of Tiger Woods' alleged mistresses also want to be informed about world events, and that serious folks like to dive into the salacious sometimes. It links to videos of the comedian Jon Stewart. It gives us columns by the sexpot actress Jessica Alba as well as by the economist Jeffrey Sachs. It knows that its readers want more opinion pieces from regular Joes, not just from the media elite. This may sound all over the map, but in reality The Huffington Post's content mix is tailored to a very particular readership.

In other words, The Huffington Post defines its niche by giving readers brain candy without going too lowbrow. Murdoch's own Wall Street Journal defines its niche by being indispensable to businessmen, by offering timely and in-depth analysis not found elsewhere.

Contrast that with the Washington Post. It is struggling because it hasn't defined itself for the digital age. We can't tell if it's a world news publication or an entertainment paper or…

Unlock the rest of this article with a 14 day trial

Already have an account?
Login here