[commerce.senate.gov]

That video starts a full hour before the hearing so manually skip ahead if you don't want to just stare at the hearing title for an hour.

The gist of it was that the Newspapers squandered their resources in the 90s when they should have been modernizing and they were still profitable. Now the money is gone. The only solution (other than perpetual government support of course) is for them all to form a jointly managed walled garden of news (and not let Google and other aggregators in of course). They would need to amend current antitrust laws to do this... very unlikely to happen.

Not ONCE was the following pointed out:

You don't need a big-budget newsroom to regurgitate press conference materials from the Whitehouse, Pentagon, State Department, etc. In fact, those agencies, as well as local police departments, high schools, local Little Leagues, and other organizations that reporters used to cover ALREADY HAVE THEIR OWN ONLINE PRESENCE!

Any newspaper that gets their coverage from Iraq off Reuters isn't really providing "Intellectual Property" for which they should make exclusive profit. Hence this notion that they should all get together and share this content among themselves, but not let it get out the the unwashed Internet publishers.

There are things that a newspaper can do that fall into the category of investigative journalism that would make each newspaper a source of unique information, but sorry, you already laid those guys off.

Finally, toward the end, someone pointed out that it was Craigslist that took gobs of revenue from the printed papers, not Google. DUH.

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The newspaper business conditioned everyone to believe their product will be free, forever. And there's no turning back.

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Owen, tech reporting isn't reporting. Get serious. It's trade reporting

Or the citizen journalists of the Huffington Post, whose scoops shaped the last election.

Sure, domestic news can be covered adequately given a large group of volunteers, but serious international news? That's not going to happen.

There's a reason why America is falling so far behind the world in serious knowledge about the world. Canada too, our newspapers are a pile of shit.

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