FCC Ought to Toss Newspaper/Broadcast Cross-Ownership Ban Entirely, New NAA CEO Says

There’s no reason to ban any cross ownership of daily newspapers and radio or TV stations in the same market, the new head of the Newspaper Association of America said after her first 65 days on the job. The NAA hopes the FCC in its ongoing review of all media ownership rules will entirely rescind the ban, Caroline Little said during Q-and-A at a Media Institute luncheon Tuesday. “We'd like to get no cross-ownership whatsoever,” Little told us about the current rules. Another NAA executive visited the commission last week to press the agency to change cross-ownership rules. A draft rulemaking notice on the quadrennial review proposes to allow waivers to be sought of the ban in the top 20 markets, restoring a rule remanded by an appeals court this summer (CD Nov 15 p5).

If complete junking of the ban is “not possible, we'd like a modification of the waivers” of cross-ownership rules, Little told us: The commission should at a minimum allow dailies and radio stations to have the same corporate owner within a market. John Sturm, who Little succeeded late this summer, also had sought to scrap cross-ownership rules (CD July 8 p3). Little used her speech to show how NAA members are using the Internet and apps to hold on to readers and the advertisers who target them even as some have raised doubts about the newspaper industry’s future. Handouts given to FCC aides last week from the association “document ongoing and forecasted declines in newspaper advertising revenues, both in general and as compared to newspapers’ multi-media competitors,” the material said. NAA said the industry’s online ad sales grew 8 percent in Q2 from a year earlier to $803.4 million. Total ad sales fell 6.9 percent to $6 billion, which includes an 8.9 percent decline in print ads to $5.19 billion.

Jointly owned newsrooms of papers and TV stations in the same market won’t necessarily degrade each medium’s content, Little said in Q-and-A, citing her experience. From 2008 to earlier this year, she oversaw all U.S. operations of the U.K.’s Guardian News and Media, and previously worked for the Washington Post Co., according to NAA’s biography (http://xrl.us/bmipub). “The newsrooms of the TV stations and the newsrooms of the paper are so fundamentally different” that degrading either side’s content if they're jointly owned is “not an issue,” she said. In addition to the Washington Post Co., companies that own both papers and TV stations and whose executives are on the NAA’s board include Cox Media, Gannett, Media General and Tribune (http://xrl.us/bmipum).

Cross-ownership rules that may have made sense in 1975, when they were adopted, no longer do now, Little said in the speech to FCC officials and executives from the broadcasting and cable industries. “The government didn’t want one owner to dominate” when there were fewer media voices, and “arguably, that rule made sense then,” she said: “But this limitation on cross-ownership simply has no place” now. “Unfortunately, newspaper/broadcast cross ownership has been in a continuous state of limbo for the past 15 years,” partly amid court challenges, Little said. She hopes the commission in its current review of media ownership “will take into account” cross-ownership’s impact on local news coverage, she continued. “We believe that the time is right for the commission to end its ban."

It’s been a “painful transformation” of the industry’s “core product” of printed papers, with digital products now accounting for 15-20 percent of total revenue, Little said in prepared remarks. “Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet to arrest the decline in print.” Paywalls where a subscription is needed to access some or all content “generally have been embraced by consumers who understand high-quality journalism ... generally comes at a cost,” she said. Little noted how the NAA has worked with the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which verifies readership, to “better reflect the real numbers of subscribers in print and online.” ABC has reformulated how it measures circulation.

Some news aggregators are misappropriating papers’ content and violating their copyright, Little said: Aggregators that “take newspaper content without any compensation for our content” are “wrong.” That’s “a violation of copyright,” she continued. Little pointed to the news licensing digital rights clearinghouse that has been formed among NAA members. “There’s this reputation that newspapers are just making it ... and it’s kind of not true,” Little said. “There are just tons of technologies out there that don’t violate privacy and help newspapers reach audiences online."

At the FCC last week, the “transformation” of newspaper publishing was discussed during meetings an NAA executive reported holding with aides to Chairman Julius Genachowski and Commissioner Robert McDowell. There’s a “need for relief from the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule,” the association said in a filing posted Monday to docket 09-182. Continued regulation of the business will have an “adverse impact” on newspaper publishing, the filing said (http://xrl.us/bmipu4).

More groups weighed in this week on the review, with 10 groups in a filing to be posted in the docket saying diversity should be a “central focus.” Minority ownership of TV and radio stations has “dropped substantially,” even as that population is growing, said the ACLU, Communications Workers of America, National Urban League, NAACP, National Hispanic Media Coalition, National Organization for Women, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, United Church of Christ and others. “Despite these statistics, the Commission presently has no meaningful policies to address racial and gender rules on those inequities” and the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia this summer for the second time said the commission needs to do more, the groups said. “The FCC should heed the Third Circuit’s call. As media consolidation grows, people of color and women become less significant players.”