A few days ago, Mike Masnick at TechDirt reported on a PDF document released by the FTC containing a number of suggestions aimed at “saving” journalism. Except, by “saving journalism,” most of the suggestions seemed to mean “saving traditional newspapers.”
Ars Technica has also taken a look at this document, though it notes the FTC has clarified that the document in question was never intended to be taken as official government suggestions—just conversation-starters. If that was their goal, they have certainly succeeded, as there is an awful lot of conversation going on right now about how misguided some of these suggestions are.
They include things like reinstituting the doctrine of “hot news”, the idea that the first newspaper to get a story can actually block others from reporting it since they put in the time and effort to get it. Or taxing ISP accounts to support on-line news sites in much the same way Canada taxes blank media to support the music industry. Or allowing an antitrust exemption for newspapers to collude on paywall agreements.
Not all of the ideas are so bad, but an awful lot of them are. It seems people are having trouble getting their heads around the idea that business models are in the midst of a permanent change, and want to try to buttress the old models as long as they possibly can.
Meanwhile, Google has its own ideas about how to save the news industry, which seem to involve depreciating the paper version and focusing exclusively on on-line content—and TechDirt is hosting a workshop on “saving journalism” on June 16th.
I don’t see ow some of these suggestions would even work in today’s world. Like the hot news one, I don’t see how you ca stop people from reporting on things. One example that comes to mind is a couple years ago there was a big train crash in censor-happy Russia and when government leaders elsewhere called in to offer whatever help, the Russian government responded by trying to deny there had even been a train crash in the first place. And meanwhile, people who were actually on the train were emailing friends and relatives off of cell phones, sending pics via camera phone to whomever, and there us Russia going nosiree, there is no train crash here…