Newspaper Industry Says It Will Raise Issue of Ad Blocking on News Aggregation Sites

Technology companies such as Apple and Google are in the Newspaper Association of America crosshairs over use of advertising blockers and fair-use copyright issues, NAA CEO David Chavern said at a Media Institute lunch Wednesday. Chavern said NAA is talking to Apple about its use of ad blockers in Apple News, and plans similar conversations with other companies. "You've got to keep letting my guys make money," Chavern said. "That keeps the reporting coming. ... At some point, we've got to get back to talking about fair use for my members." Apple didn't comment. Chavern became CEO in October and said a good portion of his job has been to evangelize about the traditional news business. "Facebook isn't going to interview the quarterback," he said. "Google's not going to interview the mayor. They don't want to." A key reason, Chavern said, is the difficulty in creating a newsroom: "That's going to be really, really expensive. Incumbency has its advantages." Despite woes about the state of the newspaper industry, Chavern said, "It's not the coal industry, it's not travel agents. People want the product." Newspapers, even with declining print circulations, are somewhat the envy of digital businesses, Chavern said, because those print operations still are profit generators -- something digital businesses find elusive. But he said the decades of enjoying 35-plus percent profit margins are gone, and newspaper companies must resign themselves to that. "It may not ever get to that again," he said. "It doesn't have to be that [level]." Given that all of the 2,000 newspapers that make up NAA are "experimenting like crazy" and generally don't compete much among one another, Chavern said, "there's an incredible opportunity for knowledge sharing," with that being one NAA goal. He previously spent nine years as U.S. Chamber of Commerce chief operating officer, and spent part of his talk discussing the ins and outs of lobbying. "This is a tough environment for advocacy," Chavern said, saying much of the job involves laying the groundwork for when legislative action has a better likelihood of passage.