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Government Backing for Newspapers?
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Connecticut lawmaker Frank Nicastro sees saving the local newspaper as his duty. But others think he and his colleagues are setting a worrisome precedent for government involvement in the U.S. press.
The precedent is set,in places like the former Soviet Union and Cuba
Nicastro represents Connecticut's 79th assembly district, which includes Bristol, a city of about 61,000 people outside Hartford, the state capital. Its paper, The Bristol Press, may fold within days along with The Herald in nearby New Britain.
Pun intended.
That is because publisher Journal Register, in danger of being crushed under hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, says it cannot afford to keep them open anymore.

Nicastro and fellow legislators want the papers to survive, and petitioned the state government to do something about it. "The media is a vitally important part of America," he said, particularly local papers that cover news ignored by big papers and television and radio stations.
You want government to do something about it? How about reducing the size of government just for starters.
If it's that vital, shouldn't someone in the private sector pony up the money in return for a share of the profits? Oh, sorry, what profit ...
To some experts, that sounds like a bailout, a word that resurfaced this year after the U.S. government agreed to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the automobile and financial sectors.
An ultimately futile bailout, BTW. Government spending is almost always a wash, transferring money from one bucket to another with near zero benefit for any sector save for government.
Relying on government help raises ethical questions for the press, whose traditional role has been to operate free from government influence as it tries to hold politicians accountable to the people who elected them. Even some publishers desperate for help are wary of this route.
The problem for newspapers are strictly economic. There was a time 20 years ago in which newspapers could have set the stage for their survival in an increasingly digital world, by improving their very quality. Currently, in nearly every market I would place journalistic quality of enwspapers an order of magnitude above electronic media simply because newspapers do the hoofing needed to gather actual news and write about it cleanly, simply and without any personal or political bias.

The point of no return blew by in 1995 and there is precious little they can do about it now.

And no: a government bailout won't help anyone save for government.
Posted by: badanov 2009-01-01
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=258721