If newspapers try to collude to on pricing of their content, I hope we can get help to fight them on antitrust grounds. Any media groups ready to take this to court on the off chance that newspaper companies have learned to cooperate?
Mind you, I defended news companies in their efforts to consolidate in the past. This, I’ve long said, was a case of the dinosaurs huddling together against the cold wind of change. Let them conglomerate, I said, because otherwise their outlets will die sooner. Indeed, media consolidation turned out to be not a problem at all – witness the falls of all the conglomerates from Tribune to Clear Channel.
But independent companies conspiring to set and fix prices is different. It is nothing short of price fixing. It is antimarket collusion. There’s a reason the newspapers who sat down to conspire had an antitrust lawyer with them – because they know they are on shaky ground.
Whatever an individual company does with its own products – if it’s foolish and suicidal enough to shrink its audience in times like these – well, fine, that’s their business. But if they try to affect the larger economy by their conspiracy, that’s different. That needs to be challenged. Poor-mouthing and decades of bad management of monopolies is not a sufficient excuse for antitrust today.
Then again, maybe we shouldn’t fight them. The sooner the dinosaurs kills themselves, the sooner the next news species will walk the earth.
: See also Scott Rosenberg on cartels.
Why is everybody so surprised at this. The fact is that the Newspaper National Network (NNN) – the papers’ own internal sales unit – received a Congressional pass a la MLB. It’s a bizarre cartel and probably unique in the world. It sets an artificially low price for advertising.
That’s right, a couple decades ago the papers goat an exemption to sell ads in certain categories below their published rates. And then, in their wisdom, they would deny those rates to any other sales group – even for in-category ads. A few years ago the restructured the NNN as an LP. But they still get the cartel pricing and almost every category is open to them.
Now they want another cartel to let them set an artificially high price. Ummmmm…k.
Eh, if they don’t report it in their papers, it won’t be a big news story, and no one will know.
So true. I keep forgetting that…
I am eating this stuff up with a SPOON!
> If newspapers try to collude to on pricing of their content, I hope we can get help to fight them on antitrust grounds.
Please don’t. Let them collude. It’s the only way that they’ll learn the value of their product. Besides, it will be fun to watch them cheat each other and argue that folks outside the cartel are cheating.
That said, I do find it ironic that they’d take this approach. The San Jose Mercury News sued some of its advertisers for colluding several years ago. Both are now circling the drain.
Seperate newspapers aren’t the only problem… Associated Press is too as they have become a defacto monopoly.
The AP has always purported itself to be a “not for profit” membership organization. Existing for the sole benefit of its members.. Those members are news papers and some broadcast outlets.
The associated press has used members dues payments to become the largest news organization in the world. with 3000 + reporters of their own they dwarf their members.
By AP’s own admission more than half the world couns on the AP as their sole source of news.
As newspapers die… and die quickly, the Associated Press behaves more like a for profit corporation than the non-profit that they hold themselves out to be.
This is very very bad for Democracy and AP monopoly should be broken, just like the Gov’t did with other monopolies.
I wouldn’t blame the AP as much as I would blame its convoluted ownership structure and board of newspaper owners, who are no longer the AP’s largest customers (and biggest commercial influence) but who do set its direction in their interest.
Newspapers began freely giving away their work on their websites thinking that it would draw readers and advertisers. But web advertising doesn’t pay and doesn’t work well.
Online aggregators take (steal) the stories from all these newspapers, thus bypassing the need for readers to visit newspaper websites.
Do any news search and you’ll see that better than 90 percent of the stories come from the newspapers across the country. You didn’t actually think that Google staffs reporters, did you?
So, the powers that be in the newspaper industry wish to put a stop to providing work for free. I personally don’t feel any of this is about price fixing … but rather, about developing a business model that works again … and stops the proliferation of their work. The music industry faced a somewhat similar problem when the digital age emerged, although they fared better because it wasn’t in the middle of a deep recession.
Times change … and nobody likes change.
I recall when I was a child and light bulbs were free. Take the bad ones to the power company, and get new replacements. I remember the uproar when folks had to start buying them. I remember when people said that nobody would pay for television … and yet we have it today in nearly every household. There was no way folks would pay for radio … and that too has emerged.
With the rapidly maturing digital age, I don’t see a problem with newspapers working together to devise a better system for being compensated for their work. I don’t like to give up my work for free, so why should they?
Newspapers serve a much more important purpose than people are willing to understand and fess up to. I hope newspapers continue on. I would be willing to pony up some coins for news.
Ooftyman on April 8, 2009 Antitrust law is just an esucxe to create jobs for attorneys… and stifle competition.
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