FTC Considers Main Stream Media Bailout as Google prepares to Charge For News

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We will now be charged for the news we subsidize as taxpayers.

Wall Street Journal reports:

The head of the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday the agency will study whether government should aid struggling news organizations, which are suffering from a collapse in advertising revenues as the internet upends their centuries-old business model.

FTC Chairman Jon Liebowitz's comments came during day one of a two-day "workshop" sponsored by the agency that became a forum for arguments among the heads of a diverse array of news organizations over the future of journalism.

Mr. Leibowitz said his agency will examine whether government should change the way the industry is regulated, from making news-gathering companies exempt from antitrust laws to granting them special tax treatment to making changes to copyright laws.

The Federal Communications Commission is already reconsidering rules that prevent a company from owning newspapers and TV stations in a single market.

Mr. Leibowitz said other ideas include extending government subsidies to commercial news organizations, granting them special tax treatment or an exemption from antitrust regulations.

Meanwhile, Skynews reports:

Google is to limit the number of news articles users can read for free on its website. The search engine said it was changing its First Click Free programme so that readers would not be able to look at more than five pages in one day.

The move follows scathing criticism of Google by Rupert Murdoch over the way it provides free access to newspaper articles in his News Corp media group.

Google said users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages

Some users have been able to get around paying subscriptions or registration by accessing news articles through Google.

Rupert Murdoch Declares War on Free Internet

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Michael Wolff
It hasn’t been a good year for Murdoch—the largest publisher of newspapers in the worst year in newspaper history. His purchase of The Wall Street Journal is widely seen as one of the worst moves of his career—News Corp. has already taken a $3 billion write-down on the purchase. His beloved New York Post, always a money loser for him, is now suffering such great losses that Murdoch is considering a partnership with or even sale to the Daily News, the Post’s arch-enemy. His once highly profitable newspaper groups in the U.K. and Australia are faltering. News Corp.’s share price has been among the hardest hit of any major media company.

And yet, Murdoch, at 78, would double-down in a heartbeat: he strategizes constantly about how he might buy The New York Times. But first he might have to save the newspaper business itself. As it happens, he, unlike almost everyone else in the business, believes newspapers are suffering not at the hands of technological forces beyond their control but at the hands of proprietors who are weaker than he is.

After fulminating for a year about how people on the Internet should pay for news, he made it official. Announcing in August the biggest losses his company has ever sustained, he added that he’d had enough and if people wanted to read his newspapers they could bloody well pay for them.

I should say I am not a neutral party here. Two years ago, I helped found Newser, a news aggregator that summarizes the stories of other news providers, which, along with the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and Google News, has become a focus of the print world’s antipathy. (When I tried to explain Newser to Murdoch, he said, “So you steal from me.”)
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Murdoch forming syndicate against free web

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The Associated Press has already made it clear they intend to charge bloggers for simply linking to their content. Now News Corps Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller has met with major news publishers including New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp., and Tribune Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times, to convince them to form a syndicate that would collect fees for news distributed online and on portable devices.

"The reality is that unless a lot of people who produce news act in unison to start charging for content, then individually they will fail," said Alan D. Mutter, a former newspaper columnist and editor and consultant on new media ventures.

LATimes:

Steve Brill's Journalism Online initiative garnered attention this spring when it announced plans to create the tools to allow publishers to collect fees for digital distribution, and recently announced that more than 500 newspapers had joined. Others who have been offering competing approaches in meetings with news executives include Borders Books and Webvan co-founder Louis Borders, according to people who have attended the briefings.

The notion of charging for digital access to news, either online or on devices, has been gaining momentum ever since the Associated Press' annual meeting in San Diego in April. William Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP and chief executive of MediaNews Group Inc., railed against the "misappropriation" of news on the Internet -- a reference widely interpreted as a swipe at search giant Google Inc.

"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," he said. "We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore."

Wall Street Journal Editor Robert Thomson added to the invective, saying Google and other news aggregators who believe that content should be free are "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet."

The hot rhetoric has yielded to more cold-eyed assessment of how to make money from the digital distribution of news. News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch said in an analyst call this month that he hoped to "build significant revenues from the digital delivery." News Corp. is among the world's largest newspaper publishers, as the owner of the New York Post, the Times of London and nearly two dozen papers in Australia.

The formation of this syndicate is an overt attempt to monopolize news content across the web; it reduces competition and is in violation of antitrust laws.