Money:
I would urge Congress to consider relaxing certain antitrust prohibitions, so that the Washington Post, the New York Times and various other newspapers can openly discuss protecting copyright from aggregators and plan an industry-wide transition to a paid online subscriber base. Whatever money comes will prove essential to the task of hiring back some of the talent, commitment and institutional memory that has been squandered. Absent this basic and belated acknowledgement that content matters—in fact, content is all—I don’t think anything can be done to save high-end professional journalism.

Until the Internet, the way they made money was by profiting from the distribution. Now that the Internet makes distribution dirt cheap and ultra-efficient, they need to find another way to make a buck from their work. They should start from the ground up and act like they are inventing the business from scratch, how will they operate, how will they make money, etc. That’s the only way out of their current predicament.

In any event, it’s good to see the old Berkeley historian get all socialist on us at the first provocation! Thanks for commenting, as always…

One way of looking at the problem that the newspaper industry has is actually not as “an Internet problem,” but rather as a collective-action problem. The issue, at bottom, is the Mary-Meeker inspired original sin, made in the first days of the Internet, to start giving away their content for free. This ingrained a culture among users that news content should be free. Once that happened, whenever a newspaper unilaterally tried to charge for content, users generally shied away, because there was always somewhere else on the Internet where you could get more or less the same content for free.

The problem, in other words, is that the newspapers haven’t been able to coordinate their shift to a pay-per-view model — this is partly a coordination problem, but it’s also partly a problem of anti-trust law, since if they did coordinate this way, it would certainly run afoul of anti-collusion laws around pricing.

But that’s just a legal issue. What if, as we’ve done with baseball, we decide that newspapers are a national treasure that deserve an anti-trust exemption? This doesn’t mean a free-for-all, and it doesn’t mean a government handout, it just means that we as a society recognize that we want to preserve their reporting and transparency function, and that this means we need to protect them on the one matter of pricing.

Along with this exemption, however, Congress would also have to get a little into the payment mechanism. My suggestion would be something like this — that newspapers set up a microcollections scheme so that you need to pay, say, a nickle for each article you read (seems about fair, no?). You’d also want to write the exemption to make clear that this doesn’t give Congress the right to scrutinize the content that is being supplied by these newspapers, just to set a maximum rate for online pricing.

You’ll still have the piracy problem, of course, but this is what Attributor’s for, no?