Federal Trade Commission: Worst Bailout of All Time? FTC wants to save journalism, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

In the spring of 2010, an arm of the United States government sat down to ask a startling question: should Washington help pay for the news? This Nimble Books edition reproduces the document at the center of that debate - the Federal Trade Commission staff discussion draft titled Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism, prepared by the FTC's Office of Policy Planning for roundtable discussions held at the National Press Club on June 15, 2010. It is one of the most candid and controversial artifacts of the early-digital reckoning over how, and whether, serious journalism could survive the collapse of its business model.

The draft is grounded in a single stark fact: the advertising revenue that had funded twentieth-century American journalism was vanishing. Newspapers had historically drawn roughly eighty percent of their income from advertising; that revenue had fallen some forty-five percent since 2000, with classified advertising alone plunging from nearly twenty billion dollars to about six. Online advertising paid only "digital dimes" against print dollars. Staff cuts followed, hollowing out coverage of statehouses, city halls, foreign affairs, and specialty beats. From this diagnosis the staff built an argument that the news is a public good - non-rivalrous, non-excludable, and prone to free-riding - and that American readers had "never paid anywhere close to the full cost" of producing it. That premise became the bridge to the draft's most explosive material.

What follows is a comprehensive menu of remedies organized into four families. Two aim to raise revenue: expanded intellectual-property and "hot news" protections against aggregators, statutory limits to fair use, industry-wide licensing, and antitrust exemptions for joint paywalls - surveyed through cases such as Perfect 10 v. Amazon, International News Service v. Associated Press, NBA v. Motorola, and Barclays v. TheFlyOnTheWall, with the 1970 Newspaper Preservation Act as precedent. Two aim to cut costs: new legal forms for nonprofit and hybrid news organizations, and technology reforms to open government data. Most provocatively, the draft catalogs proposals for direct and indirect subsidy - a journalism division of AmeriCorps, a National Fund for Local News, per-journalist tax credits, "Citizenship News Vouchers," and funding sources, relayed from advocates, that ran "as high as $35 billion annually" through taxes on spectrum, consumer electronics, advertising, and telecom bills.

The draft predictably became a lightning rod, conjuring the specter of state-influenced news, and the staff returned repeatedly to that danger. Because the FTC ultimately adopted none of these ideas, the document survives as a remarkable snapshot of a path not taken - the moment the federal government openly contemplated, then quietly declined, an active role in financing the press.

This Nimble Books print edition reproduces the draft faithfully and adds a full editorial apparatus newly prepared for this volume. A Historical Context essay reconstructs the 2009-2010 economic crisis and the workshop testimony of economists and authors such as Robert Picard, Yochai Benkler, and Robert McChesney. Two complementary abstracts - an accessible plain-language summary and an advanced analytical summary that distinguishes the draft's strong literature review from its self-acknowledged refusal to rank or cost its proposals - frame the text for every reader. A Glossary, Indexes of persons, places, and concepts, and an original computational RKHS knowledge-graph analysis situating the draft among related works on media economics complete the volume.

For media scholars, journalism students, librarians, policy researchers, and anyone weighing the future of local news against this benchmark of paywalls, philanthropy, and platform dependence, it is an essential primary source.