Congress is working to improve the financial condition of the Postal Service, which mailers hope will ease pressure on USPS and reduce the need to squeeze revenues from monopoly mailers.
The News Media Alliance and the National Newspaper Association sent a letter to President Joe Biden encouraging the Administration to use advertising in local newspapers to help build trust and acceptance of vaccines.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s new ten-year strategic plan for the Postal Service, “Delivering for America,” will impact all users of the postal system, with clear and potentially serious implications for newspaper publishers that rely on the postal system for newspaper delivery.
In mid-March, Politico published a powerful piece of investigative reporting titled “How Washington fumbled the future,” detailing the Federal Trade Commission’s 2012 investigation into Google’s anticompetitive conduct and the agency’s failure to bring a case against Google.
In the recently passed American Rescue Plan Act, which President Biden signed into law today, Congress included $1 billion in funding for an awareness campaign to build trust and acceptance of vaccines. The News Media Alliance recommends that trusted sources such as local news publishers be a top distribution channel for that campaign.
Disinformation and trust in news were key drivers of the tragic riots that took place on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol. But as the crisis unfolded, advertisers paused many of their online ads, including those running alongside news content.
We applaud all 10 states that have stepped forward to take action to address Google’s flatly anticompetitive ad technology business.
While the straight revenue share between Google AdSense and publishers was clearly tilted in favor of the publishers, Google AdSense has become less relevant for publishers who sell through Google Ad Manager, an opaque marketplace. And Google benefits significantly more from that relationship than do publishers.
The News Media Alliance commends Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-WA) for the release of her report, “Local Journalism: The Threat to America’s Most Trusted News Source,” outlining how changes in the information marketplace and the dominance of online platforms pose an existential threat to local news publishers
In response to the lawsuit filed today by the Department of Justice (DOJ) accusing Google of antitrust violations related to its search and advertising services, Alliance President and CEO, David Chavern, stated, “It is good that the DOJ is starting the process, but ‘search distribution’ issues are a small subset of the many issues presented by Google dominance. News publishers are particularly harmed by Google’s control of ad tech – and that doesn’t appear to be covered at all by the DOJ’s action today.
