Newspapers’ Stand Against Tech Giants Won’t Save Them
But it could help them resolve their existential crisis.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/07/newspapers_stand_against_facebook_is_the_right_hill_to_die_on.html

The current news economy holds much more opportunity for national and special-interest publications than it does for the local, general-interest papers.

Newspapers’ business models have been taking on water for years thanks to the rise of Google and online advertising, and they’re continuing to gradually sink as their readers find more of their news on Facebook. The social network and the omnipresent search engine steer some online traffic to publishers’ story pages, but they siphon much of the ad money along the way. Meanwhile, their free, ultraconvenient aggregation of stories from all over the internet discourages users from even visiting a newspaper’s home page, let alone paying for a subscription. So newsrooms across the country continue to jettison jobs, clinging ever tighter to Facebook even as it undermines their ability to stay afloat.

Understandably, newspapers are resorting to some desperate measures.

negotiate with Facebook and Google over ad-revenue deals and other issues collectively rather than individually

The bid is a long shot, for several reasons. Even if an anti-media Congress were to grant the papers an exemption from antitrust laws, Facebook and Google would still hold the leverage in negotiations. And any concessions they win seem unlikely to do much to secure newspapers’ long-term future.

For newspaper companies, asking Congress for help with their businesses would have been anathema even a decade ago. It runs against their fierce sense of independence from government interference and bespeaks weakness bordering on desperation. Yet weakness bordering on desperation is exactly the position in which many of them now find themselves, and even some modest short-term gains would buy them much-needed runway to keep trying to figure things out.