FTC Announces Second Workshop on the Future of Journalism

The Federal Trade Commission will hold its second two-day workshop on the future of journalism March 9-10, 2010, in Room 432 of the FTC Headquarters at 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. The agenda and information about the workshop can be found at http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/mar9/agenda.pdf.

The workshop will address proposals to better support and lower the costs of journalism, including:

• Changes to copyright law, that have been suggested as a means to require news aggregators to pay fees to news-gathering operations. Panelists will discuss whether such changes would be workable and likely achieve the desired results.
• Consideration of the potential advantages and disadvantages of combining the interests of for-profit and non-profit investors in hybrid entities, such as so-called L3Cs, as vehicles for new media organizations.
• Efforts to make government data more accessible and easily managed in ways that may lower the costs of journalism.
• Discussion of the wide variety of collaborations that news organizations may use to lower their costs and better support journalism.

The items on the FTC’s Workshop agenda track several of the issues addressed by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in its report, Informing Communities. These include directing policy toward  innovation, competition and support for business models that will provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism; increasing the role of community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity; and requiring government to operate transparently and facilitate civic uses of public data and information.

In December 2009, the FTC held the first two-day workshop to consider a wide range of issues, including: the economics of journalism in print and online; the variety of new business and non-profit models for journalism online; factors relevant to the new economic realities for news organizations, such as behavioral and other online targeted advertising, online news aggregators, and bloggers; and ways in which the costs of journalism could be reduced.

The first workshop featured a presentation of the report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt who served as one of 15 members of the Commission. Eric Newton, Vice President of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which funded the Knight Commission, was also a presenter at the December event.

The workshop is free and open to the public. Those planning to attend should arrive early to permit time to go through security screening.