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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder announcing her intentions to hold a hearing on the issue of newspaper consolidation in the San Francisco Bay area, citing anti-trust laws as a potential avenue to do something about this. The hearing would be by the Courts & Competition Policy Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, according to Pelosi's letter. (web site)

While clearly there are serious issues engulfing the newspaper industry, in San Francisco and elsewhere, the problem isn't one of anti-trust violations. Pelosi has made her feelings known. She would like a return to the Fairness Doctrine. This is a nose under the tent.

Yes, the industry is changing. It has been for years. But other than perhaps some limits on one company owning too many TV, radio and newspapers in a single market, the government really should have no role in the business of news. 

The whole news paradigm is changing. We have public radio and TV, both on national and local levels. We have both print and online-only newspapers and magazines. Examples: Seattle Post-Intelligencer has just gone to strictly online; U.S. News & World Report has become online only except for once-a-month consumer oriented issues in print; The Christian Science Monitor became the first (web site)

national newspaper to go exclusively online; and the nearly 200-year-old Ann Arbor (Michigan) News announced this week that it is going to become exclusively web based starting in July. Many other high profile newspapers have been struggling to stay afloat―in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and even the New York Times has lost much of its stock value and has had to borrow money against its headquarters in New York.

The problem is that few papers have been able to successfully monetize the news on the Internet. That's partly because advertisers aren't satisfied with the results, and subscribers are generally reluctant when they have access to so much free material on the Internet.  

The change in the news business is everywhere. We now have Propublica.com, which is 28 investigative reporters paid by the Sandlers of San Francisco, philanthropists who felt the newspapers weren't doing enough of it on their own. They have done some great work on covering the TARP funds. The Drudge Report is still the largest by far of the news aggregators, which is another type of news source that didn't used to exist. The Wall Street Journal is one of the only publications making money via subscribers. It is a unique brand that businessmen and stockholders the world over turn to and trust for its reliability on financial and political matters.

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