(Last installment in “From good to great” series)

Consider the infamous “Innovator’s Dilemma.” As a company’s main source of revenue dries up, it takes deliberate leadership to reallocate jobs and money to those areas of immature but growing revenue. Those companies with the discipline to adjust will survive and those that don’t adjust will cease to exist.

Revenues from newspaper’s printed versions are declining across the industry. But revenue from their Web sites increases in double-digit percentages. Problem is Web revenues are still small in comparison to the traditional printed newspaper.

The Wall Street Journal suggested in an article that this transition is, for some reason, hitting the Boston area before others.

"Whatever ails our industry got to Boston first," says Ken Chandler, editor of the rival newspaper, the Boston Herald. "It's the Internet. It's all the choices people have for their time."

The imperative to transition resources online is most pronounced at another Boston paper, The Boston Globe, a fellow New York Times owned newspaper. According to the WSJ article, The Globe is on track for an unprofitable year. A loss.

The Globe has been cutting costs. Last fall, the paper offered buyouts to 185 employees and to another 25 employees this year and is likely to offer more, according to people familiar with the situation. Over the summer, the Globe quietly cut 10% of the space it devotes to news each day, to save on printing costs. And yesterday, the Newspaper Guild voted on a new contract that would tie wages to revenue growth at the newspaper for four years.

Amid all this, Boston.com revenues hit the $30 million mark this year and are presumably rising.

Look no further for a real-life example of the “Innovator’s Dilemma” than Boston, where success depends on further investment in the Web. It’s not only an example, but also it’s a harbinger of what’s to come for the nation’s newspapers.

So the question isn’t “can these changes be made,” it’s “can we afford not to change?”