As the U.S. government bails out banking institutions and the automotive industry, Tim Rutten states in his Los Angeles Times column that the government should help newspapers too. Not in the form of a bailout, but through an antitrust exemption.

As demand for quality journalism increases, the ability of newspapers to fund that journalism is spiralling, yet newspapers are unable to charge for their content online as long as some are still running free sites.

"That's where the antitrust exemption would come in: It would allow all U.S. newspaper companies - and others in the English-speaking world, as well as popular broadcast-based sites such as CNN.com - to sit down and negotiate an agreement on how to scale prices and, then, to begin imposing them simultaneously," Rutten wrote in his LA Times opinion piece.

If newspapers and other news outlets were able to begin charging for content at the same time, they would then be able to turn to other matters, such as negotiating fees with news aggregators such as Google and Yahoo!.

Peter Osnos wrote in the Daily Beast this week that newspapers and magazines will "have to start demanding payment for use of their material, or they will disappear. And no one delivers more of that content online than Google does, through its search functions supported by advertising, the revenue from which goes to its bottom line. The notion that 'information wants to be free' is absurd when the delivery mechanism is making a fortune and the creators are getting what amounts to zilch.

"History shows that monopolies, like empires, eventually get into trouble. Google has insisted from the outset that it is a different kind of company, and its record of innovation has been extraordinary. Delivering the news is a great service that Google does exceptionally well. Now they should devise ways to pay for it."