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Band to fight Web

Newspaper publishers are calling on Congress to allow them to negotiate collectively with Google and Facebook as what they call the “digital duopoly” increasingly dominates digital advertising and news distribution online.

The News Media Alliance — a trade organization representing some 2,000 organizations across the US and Canada, including Dow Jones — says antiquated antitrust laws have had “the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook’s dominant position,” by limiting publishers’ ability to push for changes together.

If granted a limited waiver by Congress, the group said it would push for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for digital subscription models and a fairer share of revenue and customer data.

“Quality journalism is critical to sustaining democracy and is central to civic society,” the alliance’s president and chief executive, David Chavern, said in a statement. “To ensure that such journalism has a future, the news organizations that fund it must be able to collectively negotiate with the digital platforms that effectively control distribution and audience access in the digital age.”

Chavern laid out the case of the News Media Alliance, which also includes many regional publishers, in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.

Such a waiver is uncommon, however, and the prospects for the alliance’s push are unclear.

Publishers have long been frustrated by Facebook’s outsize role in news dissemination and commanding presence in the digital advertising market. Google and Facebook are expected to receive more than 60 percent of US digital ad spending this year, according to eMarketer.

In response to the publishers’ efforts, Facebook and Google emphasized their continuing work to help news organizations broaden their reach and find sustainable business models in their transition to digital.

Facebook increasingly has sought to engage with publishers on ways they could work together, including an initiative that would allow news organizations to sell subscriptions to readers through the social media giant’s mobile applications.

Google also has attempted to work with publishers to better highlight higher quality work and play down the output of content farms, which churn out high volumes of low-quality aggregated news, and sites that publish fictional stories masked as news.