jurvetson's Flickr photostream/Creative Commons

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is attempting to aid the nation’s struggling newspaper industry.  On the eve of yet another major American daily, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, publishing its final printed edition, the California Democrat has contacted Attorney General Eric Holder to request that the Department of Justice ease restrictions on newspaper companies merging in order to help strengthen their business operations.

“We must ensure that our policies enable our news organizations to survive and to engage in the news gathering and analysis that the American people expect,”, Pelosi wrote.  The Speaker has also announced that hearings will soon be held in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy on the issues of Antitrust laws and the survival of the newspaper industry. 

This type of government intervention is simply unacceptable.  For one, the newspaper industry is not an indispensable part of the American economy like the financial and automobile sectors are.  It is an industry that, like the typewriter, is being supplanted by a new technology and new media industry.  Newspapers have been dying a slow death for over a decade now and no unnecessary waivers to antitrust laws are going to change that.  Only embracing new media will enable the daily newspapers of yesteryear to survive into the future as full service 24 hour, multimedia news operations.  They already have the talent at their disposal to do so and it’s high time for their management to start using their imagination to figure out how to truly adapt to a new world of information.

You can takepart in checking out an advocacy voice for new media by logging onto the International Blogging & New Media Association.

LINKS:

SFGate: Pelosi goes to bat to keep Bay Area papers alive

Marketing Shift: Pelosi Urges Government Intervention to Save Newspapers

TakePart: Newspaper Deathwatch: Seattle Post-Intelligencer