• Cracks in the Pay Walls

    Victor Pickard
    August 24, 2009

    Over the weekend, Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times published a column urging Congress “to move quickly to grant the newspaper industry at least a temporary exemption from antitrust and price-fixing laws so that publishers and proprietors can, in essence, collude for survival.”

    Rutten is half-right. There is indeed a legitimate and an increasingly pressing need for government to intervene in the journalism crisis. But the policies Rutten prescribes would actually undermine the goals he professes to champion. Suspending antitrust protections to allow digital collusion, whereby newspapers erect online price-fixing schemes and place their content behind “pay walls,” is exactly the wrong policy to encourage democratic discourse.

  • Time To Take the Profit out of the News

    Victor Pickard
    July 29, 2009

    The recent Washington Post debacle of attempting to sell access to political elites via "salons" at the home of the paper's publisher offers a startling glimpse at how low commercial media have stooped. Yet we shouldn't be surprised. This is what happens when commercial news organizations are desperate for increasingly elusive profits. Such machinations will likely only get worse.

  • The Costs of the Journalism Crisis

    Victor Pickard
    July 23, 2009

    The bad news continues. Recent reports that the Bay State Banner, Boston’s only black-owned newspaper, was forced to take a city loan of $200,000 to stay afloat is further evidence that advertising no longer adequately supports newsgathering. It also shows the very real consequences of the journalism crisis, particularly for underrepresented communities.

    In many cases, debt-laden chain newspapers and big metro dailies are hurting more than others. Yet it’s increasingly clear that the problems facing the press are systemic, with the same trends of disappearing ad revenue and lower circulation numbers affecting papers of varying sizes.