Thread: Newspaper advocates address Senate on struggles industry fac

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Newspaper advocates address Senate on struggles industry faces

09:56 PM CDT on Wednesday, May 6, 2009
By TODD J. GILLMAN / The Dallas Morning News
tgillman@dallasnews.com

WASHINGTON – With newspapers battered by recession and an online revolution, senators heard bleak assessments Wednesday of a future with much less watchdog journalism.

Newspaper advocates complained that Google and other news aggregators have unfairly – even "parasitically" – hoarded revenue that publishers deserve and need. Lawmakers wrestled with how and whether government should step in.

"Today, newspapers look like an endangered species," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., noting double-digit circulation drops over just six months at papers from Boston to San Francisco. Kerry, chairing a Commerce subcommittee hearing, called it vital to "preserve the core societal function that is served by an independent and diverse news media."

But just how that might be done remained unclear.

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., pushed the idea of letting newspapers operate as nonprofits, making them eligible for the same tax breaks as churches and charities; he is worried about the fate of The Sun in Baltimore, whose owner, Tribune Corp., is in bankruptcy.

"We need to save our community newspapers and the investigative journalism they provide," he said.

But Jim Moroney, publisher and chief executive of The Dallas Morning News –representing the paper and the 2,000-member Newspaper Association of America – told senators that approach won't work for many companies. The News, for instance, spends more than $30 million a year on newsgathering. It would take an endowment worth hundreds of millions to cover that.

"It's not about saving newspapers per se, but about saving the scale of newsrooms," he said.

Moroney urged lawmakers to provide tax relief for publishers and temporary antitrust protection to let them band together and demand a bigger share of revenues collected by Google, AOL, Yahoo and other online news aggregators.

"We don't want to pull out of the digital ecosystem," he said. "We just simply want a fair compensation for the content that we publish."

Much of the three-hour hearing focused on the revenue-sharing issue. Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, insisted that newspapers do get a fair shake. Her company paid publishers more than $5 billion last year, and is developing new tools to help everyone earn more, she said.

Moroney said that only a fraction of that $5 billion goes to newspaper publishers, though, and Mayer didn't argue the point.

Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a popular online news and opinion site, argued that old-style journalism already has failed in many ways, missing the impending financial meltdown, for instance, so the hand-wringing misses the point.

"The future is to be found elsewhere," she said. "It is search engines. It is online advertising. It is citizen journalism and foundation-supported investigative funds."

Other witnesses accused her of glossing over the role that newspapers alone play in civic life.

"The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I'll be confident" in the future of journalistic oversight, said David Simon, creator of the HBO crime drama The Wire.

Simon, a former Sun reporter, said staff cuts have badly hampered his old paper's ability to protect the public. "The next 10 or 15 years in this country is going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption," he said.

It was a rare laugh line in an otherwise grim hearing.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., lamented the demise of investigative reporting as newsrooms shrink, in unusually personal terms. Her father, a longtime newspaperman, once spent a week undercover as a prison inmate for a story.

"I'm afraid that we're going to lose that watchdog, and that check, if we don't figure this out," she said.

Witnesses cited chilling statistics: 41,000 jobs cut at media companies in the past year; 9,000 newspaper jobs cut just since the start of 2009; five major newspaper companies in bankruptcy since December. Many newspapers, including The News, have cut staff, frozen retirement benefits and rolled back salaries.

Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior Republican on the Commerce Committee, deemed the online revolution exemplified by Google and The Huffington Post "fabulous," but said she's skeptical that in-depth reporting can survive without healthy newspapers.

"I would like to make sure that there's a level playing field" so publishers can justify the costs of in-depth reporting and "so that we have that main outlet that we have had for years," she said.


WHAT A LOAD OF BS ...


http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... e76de.html

Let them FAIL!

They are most likely the LEFT biased ones that DON'T report anything negative about Obama, like, THE TRUTH!!!!!!!!!

Let the FAIL!

added to the homepage

Newspapers begging Congress for Welfare bailout and takover!
http://www.alipac.us/article4199.html

Just what we need...Socialized newspapers, but then again currently it's hard to tell the difference. Let them fail!!! NO tax dollars to the newspapers!!!

Oh my! Newspapers don't need BAILOUTS! They need to fail, they are subjective enough already. Oh the the stories I could tell.

I beg everyone start going to all School Board, City, and County Meetings. You will be surprised by what your newspapers are not telling the people.

Word of mouth is so important! Talk to others daily!

LETS STOP THIS BAILOUT!!! GO HERE!!! ACT NOW!!!!

http://www.alipac.us/ftopicp-895262.html#895262

Speak Out or Forever Pay For More Bailouts!

DONE, WELL DONE