Save the (news) whales?

San Francisco Chronicle business columnist David Lazarus thinks newspapers should get an antitrust exemption that would allow them to opt out as a group from giving away their news on the Net and start charging for it.
If there was ever an industry that needed more protection from antitrust, it’s not the newspaper business. Most newspapers are still wildly profitable by most conventional standards as a result of their local monopolies. http://archives.cjr.org/year/91/6/joa.asp”>They’ve already got one sweet exemption in the form of the Newspaper Preservation Act. And Lazarus’s own employer is under fire for http://sfbayguardian.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=3213″>you don’t need to charge for the news in order to produce professional journalism.
I was quoted in the Times this week as saying, “There is absolutely no question that the next 10 years are going to be really bad for the newspaper business. Posted in Analysis, Media