Congress Considers Making Newspapers Nonprofits
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in Congress, Media
The current Congress loves nothing more than marshalling the power of government to save failing businesses. As Justin previously wrote, the latest is an effort to rescue newspapers:
“Despite the 24/7 availability of news from print, broadcast and digital sources, there remains one clear fact: When it comes to original in-depth reporting that records and exposes actions, issues, and opportunities, nothing has replaced a newspaper,” Sen. Benjamin Cardin , D- Md. , told a Senate Commerce Communications subcommittee .
Cardin introduced a bill he calls the Newspaper Revitalization Act. It would allow newspapers to operate as educational nonprofit entities with a tax status similar to public broadcasters, churches and hospitals.
The bill also stipulates that papers wouldn’t be able to endorse political candidates. And that, right there, is a massive problem. If endorsing a candidate is not allowed, what other political speech would newspapers avoid out of fear of losing their nonprofit status? Are we really saving the industry by subjecting it to editorial restrictions? Why not just exempt media from taxes altogether and avoid the tricky nonprofit status designation?
The recent failures of major newspapers has worried a lot of us. I do think, at this moment, newspapers still play a role us new media folks simply can’t and the broadcast media simply won’t. But would the eventual demise of newspapers really be the demise of the government watchdog? Is there no new media model which can keep people in power honest? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect in-depth reporting would find a way to survive even if its traditional medium doesn’t.
Whatever the case, I’m wary of any government plan which disrupts even a minor aspect of a newspaper’s autonomy.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 and is filed under Congress, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 6th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
I think making all news organizations non-profit would probably be the best gift to america in the last 50 years. Can you imagine if we didn’t have to question the impartialality (just made that word up i think) of news orgs? that would be fantastic. We all know that most news sources aren’t impartial.
May 7th, 2009 at 1:39 am
“Despite the 24/7 availability of news from print, broadcast and digital sources, there remains one clear fact: When it comes to original in-depth reporting that records and exposes actions, issues, and opportunities, nothing has replaced a newspaper,†Sen. Benjamin Cardin , D- Md.
This is nonsense. Most surviving daily newspapers do virtually no “original in-depth reporting” and expose little other than the local weather, sports and crime stories, all of which are covered very nicely by TV and radio. You can “read” the news in the Chicago Tribune — which is one of the big metro papers — in five minutes, and most of what you read will be wire copy (sometimes re-edited) and syndicated features. I can’t think of any reason why the occasional “in-depth” story in Chicago reported by the Trib could not be generated equally well by an all online counterpart to the Trib — without the huge costs associated with composing, printing, distributing and disposing of the hard copies.
There are a handful of news organizations that generate the overwhelming amount of serious journalism in America — the WSJ, NYT, WaPo, USA Today (barely in this group), AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, the TV networks, NPR, and a handful of syndicates that distribute features and commentary. Only a few of these outlets are newspapers, and even those are actually already hybrids: e.g., the NYT is a news service, a syndicate and already has an elaborate online edition. News and opinion magazines have already migrated to the Web to such an extent that selling the hard book is virtually an act of sentimentality. These news organizations are by and large healthy. The problem faced by the NYT and WaPo is mainly a matter of finding a way to make money on their online content. If you buy the NYT daily at your news stand, it costs you about $650 a year. If you read it online, it costs you nothing. This is absurd and simply cannot continue indefinitely. It won’t. This content is valuable and it sells. A way will be found to monetize it on the Web, even if it takes an alliance with Google.
When people cry in their beer about the demise of papers, they are usually talking about the “big” regional dailies — the Boston Globe, LATimes, Chicago Tribune, etc. Seriously, though, these papers exist because not so long ago you needed printing plants and trucks and newstands in your area to distribute the news. In a time of instant electronic communications, that’s no longer necessary to get the news. What’s so bad about the US developing three or four national newspapers, like Britain, France or Germany? Since you can mix and match content online easily, you can produce a national Times with local news segments. The transition to a model of this kind will take a bit of entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, that’s something that has been missing in the publishing industry where papers are owned by self-important families, billionaires who want their own voice, and chains that manage papers like widgets for advertisers,
In any case, putting dying papers on the public tit – which is what an indirect tax subsidy amounts to — won’t save them for long. If people don’t buy the thing, it dies anyway. Many prominent papers have been subsidized by owners for years, even decades, only to keep fading.