Obama Considers Newspaper Bailout

Relief for the news industry may be on the way. The Hill reports that President Obama said he's "happy to look at" bills that would offer tax breaks to news organizations that restructure themselves as nonprofits. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has already introduced S. 673, called the Newspaper Revitalization Act, which has earned one co-sponsor, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, and would give tax breaks to news outlets restructuring as 501(c)(3)s. For his part, Obama criticized the state of modern journalism. Although he conceded that quality journalism is "critical to the health of our democracy" the president is "concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void, but not a lot of mutual understanding."