Amid debate about possible government subsidies to keep newspapers afloat, comes a study noting that governments have long supported newspapers, but less so in recent years. In the last four decades, the postal discount for papers has dropped from 75 percent to 11 percent, and that's just the biggest example, according to Geoffrey Cowan and David Westphal of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
The researchers found that "government support for newspapers and magazines has fallen from more than $4 billion in 1970, to less than $2 billion," Richard Pérez-Peña of The New York Times writes on the paper's Media Decoder blog. The decline in the postal discount amounts to a difference of about $1.7 billion in today’s dollars, the researchers concluded. And they say another $1 billion will eventually go by the boards when state legislatures allow local governments to post legal notices on their own Web sites and stop paying newspapers for advertising space. “It’s almost inevitable that this will happen,” Westphal said. The Times paraphrases him as saying that legal ads "are especially important to the smallest papers."
Westphal, executive in residence at the school and former Washington editor for McClatchy Newspapers, "noted that the study did not even take into account the notices that the government requires private entities to buy in newspapers and magazines, like bank foreclosure notices and drug-company disclaimers about their new products. The third major category of government support takes the form of special tax treatment for publications, like reduced sales tax rates on paper and ink. The study’s authors cited state and federal tax breaks worth at least $900 million." (Read more)
No comments:
Post a Comment