The Washington Monthly reposted this
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Phil Longman has an excellent piece in the new issue of The Washington Monthly about how taking on monopolies can help revive #localnews, which plays an essential role in strong communities and the agency residents feel in participating and making a difference. Here's a lead-in from Paul Glastris, the Monthly's editor in chief: "The underlying assumption we all have in our heads is that new technologies—digital advertising, social media—have rendered the advertising-driven business model of traditional news organizations obsolete, and until those organizations find some other source of revenue, we're all just going to have to live with less journalism, especially at the local level. "And then new media outlets come on the scene, sometimes with millions of venture capital dollars behind them—and they go belly up or are forced to decimate their newsrooms. Longman, a senior editor at the Monthly and policy director at the Open Markets Institute, argues that the economic collapse of the journalism industry isn't the inevitable consequence of technological change. In fact, the fundamentals of journalism are—or should be—sound. Americans are every bit as hungry for quality reporting as ever. And advertisers are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into reaching those readers. The money that could be financing news producers just isn't making it to them because Google and Facebook are using their monopoly over online ads to hoover it up. And that monopoly power is not foreordained. It is the result of specific choices policymakers in Washington made decades ago over how to regulate new technologies. " ... Google controls up to 90 percent of national markets and siphons off an average of 30 cents of every dollar flowing through its ad exchanges. Reviving old antitrust doctrines and enforcing what's already on the books will go much further toward saving journalism than well-intentioned efforts to reinvent it." Read on. #localnews #antitrust #journalism #democracy #community