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Newspaper representatives and New Media figures gathered to discuss the future of newspapers in a digital age at a specially-convened Senate hearing in Washington today.
Img: Christian Science Monitor newspaper. Credit: stan/flickr
Former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, in his role as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, called the hearing because he believes, "newspapers look like an endangered species."
The senator said print newspapers had been surpassed as the most efficient way of disseminating the news.
"As a means of conveying news in a timely way, paper and ink have become obsolete, eclipsed by the power, efficiency and technological elegance of the Internet," the Massachusetts senator told the hearing.
Sen. Kerry said that, while online journalism had mushroomed in recent years, he was skeptical of whether similar journalistic values applied, querying "whether online journalism will sustain the values of professional journalism the way the newspaper industry has?"
However, he stuck to his position that relaxing cross ownership rules -- legislation placing restrictions on owning broadcast stations -- would not save the industry.
"When you look at how fast technology is moving -- how the economics of news delivery really work in an age where everything you read in ink can be found on the Web faster and cheaper and further from where it is printed -- well, you are whistling past the graveyard if you think that relaxing cross ownership rules will save newspapers," said Sen. Kerry.
The debate regarding the use online news aggregators such as Google and Yahoo make of traditional newspaper stories has grown angrier in recent times with the Associated Press even famously referring to them as "parasitic."
Jim Moroney, publisher and chief executive of The Dallas Morning News called for a greater share of revenue for newspapers from online aggregators.
Representing both the paper and the 2,000-member Newspaper Association of America, Moroney pointed out his newspaper spends $30 million USD per year on gathering news.
"We don't want to pull out of the digital ecosystem," he said. "We just simply want a fair compensation for the content that we publish."
However, Google vice president Marissa Mayer told the hearing that publishers do receive adequate compensation, pointing out that her company paid out $5 billion USD last year.
Perhaps the most cogent summing up of the predicament of newspapers came from Arianna Huffington, editor of the popular online publication Huffington Post. Representing New Media, Huffington argued that people were dissatisfied with old-style journalism, with its deficiencies exposed in recent years over such subjects as Iraq and the financial meltdown.
"The future is to be found elsewhere," she said. "It is search engines. It is online advertising. It is citizen journalism and foundation-supported investigative funds."
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