Nobody Wants to Pay Taxes to Save Newspapers, and Why Should They?

The newspaper industry is almost, but not quite, running like a headless chicken in the last throes of life thanks to the digital revolution. Can it be supported by extra taxes? Should it be?

Regardless of your answer, a new survey shows that nobody wants to pay the tax anyway. A national telephone survey by Rasmussen Reports has a staggeringly bold statistic to support this fact: Of 1,000 adults surveyed over two days this week, 84% of respondents oppose imposing a 3% tax on cell phone calls to provide a fund to prop up the newspaper business and "traditional" journalism. 76% of people opposed a 5% tax on computers, including devices like iPads and Kindles for the same purpose, and 74% opposed a tax on news Web aggregators to help support the "traditional" news services they draw their stories from. A full 71% of respondees opposed the idea of creating a tax-funded program to hire and support young reporters to work in nationwide newspapers, and only 14% of those surveyed supported the notion. Instead of taxing the public (the news consumers, remember!) to save an old industry, perhaps the FTC's efforts are better spent helping the industry grasp the amazing opportunities the digital revolution offers, taking all the core values and energy of "traditional" journalism into the new medium. Check out this fascinating effort by the Journal Register Company, reported by Niemen Labs, to try to revolutionize its business. Taking a leaf out of uber-high-tech Google's book it's creating a limited-place "ideaLab" program where journalists would have 25% of their time freed up to experiment with new media's hottest tools to try to create ideas for future JRC news publication. As the JRC's CEO John Paton notes, journalists were once famed for being revolutionary, rule-challenging, anarchic, and innovative ... hence the current trend to "support" the status quo by taxation is actually rather shocking.