By Barbara Cochran, RTNDA President

“Welcome to the brave new world,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, in opening this week’s hearing on the future of journalism.

The discussion at the Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet really focused on the future of newspapers, which, as several panelists pointed out, is not the same as the future of journalism.  But, as Kerry noted, television and radio will experience in the near future what is happening to newspapers now, so I thought it was important to listen in on the dialogue.
   
The witnesses included the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, the founder of the Huffington Post, Google’s vice president for user experience and the writer-director-producer of HBO's The Wire. The discussion pitted practitioners of “legacy” media against the new media, described by The Wire’s David Simon as “parasites.”  The new media representatives returned the favor by comparing newspapers to the failing auto industry. While senators from both parties praised the contributions of newspapers to democracy, it was not clear what lifelines government could or should throw their way.

The principal complaint from the newspaper side was that online aggregators, like Google and HuffPost, are using their intellectual property, which they spend millions to produce, for free. Arianna Huffington and Marissa Mayer of Google countered that the aggregators send thousands of users to the newspapers’ web sites and that those links can be monetized.

One of the main concerns was what happens to local news if newspapers cut back severely or go out of business altogether. “The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore Zoning Board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we've actually reached some sort of equilibrium," said Simon, himself a former Baltimore Sun reporter who depicted a Baltimore daily scathingly in the most recent season of his series.

Alberto Ibargüen, president of Knight Foundation, president of Knight Foundation, was among those endorsing non-profit community-based structures to report local news. Other ideas included an anti-trust exemption to allow the newspaper industry to negotiate a fee structure with the aggregators. Some of the proposals would affect broadcasters: a fee paid by commercial broadcasters to support public media and new public interest obligations for local broadcasters, an idea already being studied at the Federal Communications Commission.

No one in broadcasting should cheer what’s happening to newspapers. We all benefit when the sources of news-gathering and content are varied, diverse and competitive. But as newspapers add audio and video to their websites, they are entering more into the realm that used to belong exclusively to radio and television stations.  Television and radio journalists need to meet that competition with all of the resources and creativity they can muster. The future of journalism can be exciting as long as journalists are flexible, entrepreneurial and open to experiment.
 

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Welcome To The Brave New World

It was troublesome to me, in a way, that Congress would hold a hearing on the future of the only business the Constitution specifies by name that they should stay out of.

That having been said, it did call attention to the very real challenge of how "traditional" journalists -- print and electronic -- are, or are not, adjusting to what just a few short years ago was "the future."

You don't need a Congressional hearing, though, to figure out which traditional media companies are going to become roadkill on what we used to call the "information superhighway."

They're the ones who blame aggregators for ruining their business model instead of embracing them as part of the solution to their problems.

They're the ones who extend subscription discounts to Kindle DX users but only if they live where home delivery is not available.

They're the ones who raise newsstand prices during the greatest economic downturn since the Depression. (Don't get me started on this new movement to start charging consumers for online journalism.)

And they're the ones who are dealing with the collapse of local advertising markets by cutting technology and people who can help them thrive in the "brave new world" once things get better.

By the way, you can add that to the very short list of the only sure things in our world: Death, taxes, no one ever cut their way to prosperity and recessions always end.

It's amazing to me that some of the smartest people in the business always forget the last two.