Newspaper Phone Spam

by Bruce Schimmel

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will soon create a national “Do Not Call” list. After that, interstate telemarketers will have to respect your request to be left alone -- unless they happen to be hawking newspapers.

That's the hope of the National Newspaper Association (NAA), which says that newspapers are so vital to the welfare of their communities that publishers shouldn't have to play by the rules that bind everyone else.

That's not right -- as many in the industry are saying privately -- but these are tough times for daily papers. (The NAA is a trade organization that represents more than 2,000 newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, and City Paper. City Paper has never telemarketed to its readers.)

In comments the NAA filed recently with the FTC, the trade group argues that newspapers provide "valuable public benefits," and are often recognized as official journals of record.

But then the NAA laments that newspapers are losing readers at unprecedented rates. The typical paper, they say, must now sell 60 percent of its total circulation every year just to keep its current readership. Readers are no longer re-upping on their own. Without telemarketing, subscription-based newspapers will decline further and faster. And telemarketing, they say, is the most cost-effective means to sell newspapers.

To anyone trying to eat dinner at home in peace, it's a no-brainer that phone spamming is among the most effective ways to sell just about anything. It's cheap and it works, which is why telemarketing regulations for nonprofits are less stringent than those governing for-profits. Charities need the extra help.

So, in effect, when newspapers ask for similar protections, they are asking the government to treat them as charities.

Yet then they argue that the new FTC regs would curtail a paper's business right, infringing on its "constitutionally protected commercial free speech."

For those of us who love newpapers of all shapes and sizes, it is sad to see some struggling. But it is clear that dailies are no longer essential centers of community information and discourse.

They are not public utilities or charities. And at this point, big dailies are more beholden to stockholders of their corporations than stakeholders in the communities they serve.

Everyone, even big dailies, has a right to free speech. But to grant newspapers special favors to call you at home is to turn that right on its head.

Because their right to speak freely shouldn't have to cost us our time and privacy.

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October 9, 2003
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