I first read the suggestion of an anti-trust exemption for newspapers to jointly agree to start charging for content in DeLong’s piece in the American magazine.
He wrote: “The LA Times talked of the need for an antitrust exemption so newspapers can jointly agree to stop giving away the product, and several columnists have chimed in about the need for monetization.”
Anti-trust was an issue back in 1970, when the Newspaper Preservation Act allowed newspapers to enter joint operating agreements.
The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 was an Act of the United States Congress, signed by President Richard Nixon, that authorized the formation of joint operating agreements among separate competing newspaper operations within the same market area. The act was designed to exempt newspaper from antitrust laws to allow the survival of multiple daily newspapers in a given urban market in the face of declining circulation. This exemption stemmed from the fact that the alternative is usually for at least one of the newspapers, generally the one published in the evening, to cease operations altogether.
– Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970
So now faced with declining newspapers Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times is suggesting a new anti-trust exemption.
Two major newspapers — the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times — charge readers tiered fees to view their online journalism. The rest of the industry has decided there’s more money to be made in charging advertisers for the larger audiences that free content attracts than in selling online subscriptions.
That’s wrong, in my view, but it’s hard to argue with as long as some major newspapers are giving their online journalism away; until they stop, nobody can risk charging for theirs. That’s where the antitrust exemption would come in: It would allow all U.S. newspaper companies — and others in the English-speaking world, as well as popular broadcast-based sites such as CNN.com — to sit down and negotiate an agreement on how to scale prices and, then, to begin imposing them simultaneously.
– Newspapers need an antitrust exemption 4 Feb 2009