I recently took part in a colloquium on the future of journalism and read and discussed a lot of interesting essays, studies, and papers on the economics of news provision and dissemination and was thus quite interested when my colleague Pedro Sette Câmara sent me a link today to this essay from the Washington Post: “Laws That Could Save Journalism,” by Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown.
My quick response:
1. It should not be the business of the legislator to aim at particular outcomes, such as delivering an allegedly optimal mix of news and entertainment. Such an attitude would have stifled many innovations from which we have benefited greatly.
2. Eliminating restrictions on “media concentration” would be positive, but the same people who complain about the decline of newspaper journalism share the interventionist mentality with those who favored all the restrictions that make media integration more difficult. I suspect that the overlap would be substantial.
3. New business models don’t depend on deliberate crafting of “the legal tools to succeed.” (“It is unrealistic to demand new business models from the press without giving it the legal tools to succeed.”) That presupposes that someone already knows what the right business model is.
Why do we need new laws to “save” journalism? Can’t the Obama administration simply take it over and subsidize it too?
But I did find interesting the idea that journalism needs monopoly power over the ideas in a news story (the “hot news” doctrine). No doubt the first to uncover and write on a story gets sole rights to it. It seems a sure way to genuinely kill journalism.