Newspaper executives met in Chicago two weeks ago to discuss how to legally monetize their content.
Thursday’s meeting was called “Models to Lawfully Monetize Content,” according to an agenda obtained by The Associated Press. James Warren, a former managing editor for the Chicago Tribune, reported about the meeting earlier on The Atlantic’s Web site.
The meeting was held “to discuss how best to support and preserve the traditions of newsgathering that will serve the American public,” according to the Newspaper Association of America, the trade group that organized the gathering. An antitrust lawyer attended the meeting to caution the participants about laws prohibiting collusion or other anticompetitive measures.
– Newspaper execs meet to discuss Internet options 28 May 2009
Some say newspapers need to work together because some changes can’t be successfully made for individual newspapers. If one or a few charge for news content, readers can browse to other news sources.
LA Times columnist Tom Rutten had suggested before that there be an anti-trust exemption for newspapers to start charging together. He wrote more about the recent meeting.
The problem is that newspapers in the United States can’t begin charging for online content or licensing their journalism to search engines unless all the English-speaking papers do it at once. That’s currently illegal under laws barring collusion and price-fixing.
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The Obama administration ought to listen to Rupert Murdoch, whose sprawling News Corp. operates The Wall Street Journal and New York Post. In a recent interview, he said newspapers that have gone “rushing on the Web to try and get a bigger audience, more attention for themselves, have damaged themselves. And now they’re going to have to pull back from that and say, ‘Hey, we are going to charge for this.”‘
Newspapers confront the internet’s stark reality 5 Jun 2009