[Annewsded]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/bu...a/14cache.html

Media Cache

Preserving Journalism, if Not Papers

By ERIC PFANNER
Published: June 13, 2010

PARIS — The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking for ways to “support the reinvention of journalism.” Possible measures to help the troubled U.S. news business, outlined in a paper published last month and scheduled to be discussed at a meeting Tuesday, include public subsidies, charity and stronger copyright protection.

Before heading in any of these directions, policy makers might want to read another report, this one set to be published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based group of wealthy free-market democracies. It examines the state of the news business in the 31 O.E.C.D. member states and the kinds of bailouts that are under way or up for discussion.

One thing that comes across starkly in the report is just how much worse the newspaper business is faring in the United States than in other O.E.C.D. countries.

From 2007 to 2009, industry revenue fell 30 percent in the United States; the second-biggest decline was 21 percent, in Britain. Countries like Germany (down 10 percent), South Korea (down 6 percent), Australia (down 3 percent) and Austria (down a mere 2 percent) fared better. So did France, which posted a decline of 3 percent, though from an already low level.

Meanwhile, fewer than half of all adults in the United States regularly read newspapers in 2008, compared with 96 percent in Iceland.

Another striking discrepancy shown in the O.E.C.D. study is U.S. newspapers’ extraordinarily high reliance on advertising, rather than sales of copies or subscriptions. In 2008, advertising contributed 87 percent of newspapers’ revenues in the United States, compared with 53 percent in Germany, 50 percent in Britain and 35 percent in Japan.