Websites Hurting News Business but Could be Made to Help, FCC Told
Online news aggregators and search engines are hurting older news organizations, the Newspaper Association of America told the FCC in comments in its Future of Media proceeding. The sites copy or summarize newspaper content and often sell their own ads on the traffic that content generates, the association said. “This exploitation of the extensive investments that newspapers make in original local, in-depth, and investigative journalism is taxing the limited resources of newspaper publishers,” it said. And the profits the sites make aren’t plowed back into turning out journalism, the association said.
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News organizations are taking cues from social media with few assurances that there will be a successful business online, Society of Professional Journalists President Kevin Smith wrote. “Simply having a presence on Facebook doesn’t guarantee the press a monetizing success when it comes to tapping into local content,” he said.
As elements of the newspaper “bundle” have found stand-alone success online in sites such as craigslist, Monster and Ebay, it’s worth wondering whether government can encourage the “rebundling” of news with those types of advertising, the New America Foundation, Free Press and Media Access Project said. “Might search engines, for instance, consider always placing news headlines, stories or links at the top of any page returning a search query, regardless of the nature of the search query?” they said. “Might prominent e-commerce and social networking sites such as Ebay, Craigslist, Facebook and Amazon consider doing the same? Or might such entities consider supporting small news gathering enterprises of their own that they integrate into their existing lines of business?"
Although regulators have no authority to impose requirements like those on Web content providers, “such suggestions should be seen as a starting point for an at-this-point largely non-existent conversation about how and if online content providers could adopt some component of the public trustee ethos that has historically characterized traditional media outlets,” the public-interest groups said.
The FCC’s authority, or its lack of authority, was the subject of several comments. The Media Institute filed a one-page comment offering nothing more than an admonition to keep in what the First Amendment says. The Progress & Freedom Foundation went further, saying the very existence of the commission’s inquiry could have a chilling effect on free speech. “What are those who are already in the media business and highly regulated by the FCC to do in response to this inquiry,” PFF said. “Do they risk incurring a more activist FCC if they do not produce the kind of journalistic content the FCC desires?"
Commercial broadcasters took the opportunity to push for looser local ownership regulations. “It is imperative that the commission bring its local broadcast TV ownership regulations into the digital era in order to permit local TV stations in medium and small markets to continue providing the local news and information programming that viewers demand,” said Nexstar Broadcasting. The ownership restrictions keep broadcasters from fully competing with other media, the NAB said. “Ironically, rules meant to promote viewpoint diversity may undermine that goal by preventing combinations and ventures that could save or expand local journalism.”