Public Policy and Funding the News
This is a guest post by David Westphal, senior fellow at the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy at the University of Southern California. He is the author, along with Geoffrey Cowan, of Public Policy and Funding the News, published this week by the University of Southern California’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.
For most of American history, the government has helped sustain commercial news businesses in two significant ways. It has offered steeply discounted mailing rates to newspaper and magazine publishers, and it has required government agencies and commercial businesses alike to publish paid notices in newspapers.