First, President Obama said he would be “happy to look at” legislation designed to assist struggling newspapers. Then the Joint Economic Committee held a “Future of Newspapers” hearing last Thursday. Now the Federal Trade Commission plans to get in on the woe-is-newspapers action as well, with a two-day workshop on Dec. 1-2 called “From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”

A group of newspaper-industry lawyers met in Washington last week and collectively scratched their heads over what the FTC is up to. An email distributed following the meeting summed up the sense of the group as “one of wariness.”