Newspapers need an antitrust exemption

[Commentary] The US newspaper industry needs help. It could come from the government in the form of a antitrust exemption that would allow all US 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. That, in turn, would set the stage for tackling the other leg of this problem -- how to extract reasonable fees from aggregators like Google and Yahoo, which currently use their search engines to link to news that newspapers and broadcasters pay to gather.