Newspapers and Their Groups Size up FCC’s Future of Media Proceeding

Historically non-regulated media companies are approaching the FCC’s Future of Media proceeding cautiously, industry officials said. Most newspapers will leave it to their trade associations to file comments, and some question the agency’s jurisdiction in the area. “I don’t expect them [our members] to file anything that is exhaustive,” said Newspaper Association of America President John Sturm. “It just doesn’t seem to warrant that, at least from the newspaper side. I don’t know what they'll do with regard to their broadcast interests,” he said. “The bottom line is there will be some general information filed on a respectable basis to the commission, but unlikely to be any kind of serious data dump."

Some news organizations and their trade groups aren’t sure how the government can help. “In our current challenges, we believe our job is to sort through how the market is going to decide those answers,” said Mark Zussman chairman of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. “Our industry is not necessarily looking to Washington, D.C., for salvation.” But he said there could be some areas in copyright law where the government could be helpful.

The FCC isn’t solely relying on the industry to come forward with comments, said Steven Waldman, who’s running the project. “I never had the assumption that the entirety of the FCC’s research would be what people submit as comments,” he said. “I know that’s the traditional approach, but we're doing comments, one-on-one interviews and also just reviewing the records of many other conferences and reports.” He said he has met with executives from newspapers, online media, broadcasters, union officials and academics, all of whom have been generally receptive. “Once you explain what the mission of this is, everyone understands how central newspapers are to the story,” he said. “I haven’t had any meeting where people have said ‘you just have no business looking at newspapers’ or ‘I don’t know why I'm here.'"

Smaller papers with limited resources want to participate but have more than one government agency to answer to now, said Jim Haigh, a board member of the Association of Free Community Papers. “This was kind of a surprise to us that the FCC was going to open this,” he said. “That seemed to us somewhat redundant since only a month and a half before the FTC had already held its first workshops.” The AFCP will probably file very similar comments to both agencies, he said. “It seems like there’s a lot of overlap between what they're asking for,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of resources for this."

Haigh is encouraging members to get involved, he said. He'll brief his board and members at an upcoming conference, he said. He’s worried that the scope of community newspapers’ business isn’t fully understood by Washington or by some of the foundations whose research has helped spur government interest in the area, Haigh said. “There’s been a severe undercounting of the thousands of community publications who have been doing this for decades, if not longer."

The FCC is trying to avoid too much overlap with the FTC’s efforts, Waldman said. “The FTC has focused a bit more on copyright and antitrust and intellectual property and tax policy,” he said. “We are focusing so far more on broadcast public interest obligations, cable, the public and non-commercial media.” The FCC’s next Future of Media workshop, on public media, is scheduled for April 30, he said.

There are some differences between the FCC and FTC proceedings, leading companies to focus on the latter, said lawyer Kevin Goldberg of Fletcher Heald, representing the American Society of Newspaper Editors. “First, the FTC does have the power to act in some areas that have a more direct effect on the content and viability of newspapers,” he said. “Second, their inquiry was not nearly as broad and sweeping as the FCC’s."

ASNE doesn’t plan to participate in the FCC’s proceeding, Goldberg said. “That’s unlikely to change unless they give us a reason to do so,” he said. “Generally, it’s been the publishers, not the editors, who have taken the lead on these more business-related issues.”