This articles explores how factors present at the startup of online news enterprises influence their development and sustainability. Using entrepreneurship and management literature as a base, it presents and analyzes three case studies in which different arrays of organizational factors were present and how they affected the first three years of the organizations' activities. It reveals that "formational myopia"-pre-existing expectations and organizational objectives based on the entrepreneurs' past experiences-played important roles in their development and that the abilities of the firms to adapt their strategies and practices after establishment were crucial to their sustainability.