The newspaper business is in serious trouble. To help it out, Senator Ben Cardin is introducing legislation that will allow newspapers to operate at non-profits, thus presenting them with new revenue streams without damaging most existing ones:
Cardin introduced a bill Tuesday that would permit newspapers to operate as nonprofits, or 501(c)3 corporations, much as public broadcasting now does.
Under this arrangement, advertising and subscription revenue would be tax-exempt, and contributions to support coverage or operations could be tax-deductible.
Such a structure would require at least one significant change for most newspapers: They would not be allowed to make political endorsements, a staple of many editorial pages.
It isn't clear if this will work, because the non-profit sector is being hit even harder than the newspaper industry right now. Even beyond that, there is a more fundamental reason to question this legislation: are local newspapers actually worth saving?
Newspapers sell information. Americans are consuming news information at record rates. The cost of information is declining significantly with the rise of the Internet. As such, the newspapers that are failing simply have not increased the amount of relevant information they provide at a rate that maintained pace with the declining cost of information. And isn't the problem local newspapers face really as simple as that? It simply is not clear what essential service local newspapers provide that either is not, or cannot be, provided by other, cheaper mediums.
One counter-argument that does make sense to me on both a political and personal level is that local newspapers provide good local jobs. The blogosphere, by contrast, is giving rise to something akin to a digital sweatshop. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Americans are producing enormous amount of content for pay that is just above, or below, minimum wage and includes neither benefits nor weekends. That is not a sustainable model for the people producing the content. If that is the brave new future we face, then maybe instead of talking about saving newspapers, we should be talking about creating a national union hall for paid blogging. If a news outlet, or a computer company, or a progressive organization want to hire someone to blog for them, maybe there need to be standard, minimum rates of pay that everyone is forced to observe. Any website that does not observe that policy gets de-linked, or something.
I don't know if it would work, but its worth thinking about.
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