I stumbled on this New York Times piece by Kevin Martin - and I'm wondering how he wrote this:

At the heart of all of these facts and figures is the undeniable reality that the media marketplace has changed considerably over the last three decades. In 1975, cable television served fewer than 15 percent of television households. Satellite TV did not exist. Today, by contrast, fewer than 15 percent of homes do not subscribe to cable or satellite television. And the Internet as we know it today did not even exist in 1975. Now, nearly one-third of all Americans regularly receive news through the Internet.

and then followed with this:

If we don’t act to improve the health of the newspaper industry, we will see newspapers wither and die. Without newspapers, we would be less informed about our communities and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and a diversity of viewpoints. The challenge is to restore the viability of newspapers while preserving the core values of a diversity of voices and a commitment to localism in the media marketplace.

So let me get this straight: I have a lot more sources for news coverage now than I did in 1975 - back then, I had hideously bad local news (TV), a local newspaper that repeated news-wire coverage for non-local stories, and the national news on one of 3 networks at 7 PM - for a whopping 30 minutes.

Now I have the entire internet, including overseas sources, multiple cable news outlets - and still, if I cared, the local paper. I'm not seeing the problem, unless you define the problem as "how can Kevin Martin keep receiving a printed newspaper". He goes on at some length over how ownership rules for TV and newspapers ought to work, but that just doesn't matter: regardless of who owns the local paper, circulation numbers for the print edition are going to keep going down. Period, end of story. To be brutal about it, fretting over FCC rules is akin to arguing over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin...

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