Extra! Dinosaur Exhumed Near City Room!

Matt Welch at Reason (surprise!) unloads a diatribe against the prospect of a newspaper bailout. He's right on, but he might have mentioned one point of history: the biz already had a bailout back in the dirigist Nixon yeaars when Congress passed the Newspaper Preservation Act, allowing"competing" newspapers to enter into joint operating agreements that would otherwise violate the anti-trust laws. It's a handy reminder that economic problems of the dinosaur media are nothing recent, not the product of the computer revolution. It's been a failed business model for a long time, for most everyone except enjoying the economic rents available behind the paywall of a local monopoly. It certainly has cost consumers money and my guess is that it hasn't worked all that well for the owners: a skim of Wiki's list of operating agreements suggests that a good many of them went ahead and failed anyway. The Preservation Act itself is the product of a mentality that could believe it was a good thing to bail out Chrysler, for example, or Lockheed. It's hard to imagine Congress adopting it today, but oddly enough this guy thinks it would be a good idea.