Along with a lousy economy, the news business faces many other challenges. Chief among them are content-poaching Internet aggregators (outfits like GoogleNews that harvest headlines for free and don’t pay to produce news) that have made it increasingly difficult for traditional news outlets to fund the sort of tenacious, watchdog journalism that’s become one of the linchpins of our democratic society.
The issue prompted a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on the “Future of Journalism and Newspapers.” Topic A: allowing newspapers to become nonprofit organizations.
The nonprofit path may offer one alternative to traditional publishing models, though we continue to believe there’s a healthy income to be earned gathering and disseminating the news.
Toward that end, Dallas Morning News Publisher Jim Moroney testified at the hearing and offered three things that Congress can do to help newspapers right now:
— Provide temporary tax relief by passing the Baucus-Snowe Act, which would allow newspapers (or any other businesses) to offset losses from 2008 and 2009 against the past five years earnings.
— Give newspapers a limited antitrust exemption that would allow them to share ideas and investigate collaborative new business models.
— Allow newspapers to devise a way to ensure fair compensation from Internet outlets that use their content to generate their own advertising revenues.
We agree. Particularly on that third point. As Moroney told the subcommittee, too many online aggregators are free-riding on the investments newspapers make in local journalism.
The future of journalism will largely be tied to advances in electronic media. But the notion that good journalism can be had for nothing is an expensive fallacy.
As television producer and former reporter David Simon testified, “High-end journalism is a profession. It requires daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out.”
Professional journalism’s not cheap. Neither is democracy. Sen. John Kerry, who chaired the hearing, opened the proceedings quoting Joseph Pulitzer: “Our republic and its press will rise and fall together.”
Save the news and save the nation.
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