UK competition laws must be addressed to allow newspaper publishers to jointly discuss the threat of aggregators to their online revenues, Guardian Media Group's chief executive told a parliamentary committee today.

Carolyn McCall told the House of Commons select committee that online aggregators of news are taking revenues, but not readers, from local media websites - yet publishers cannot take action as a group.

As a result of current law, 'we as publishers cannot sit in a room together and talk about the issue of aggregators,' she said.

"We would be in collusion. We have to, as individual players, think about this (…) we cannot sit in room and talk about this even with lawyers, because it would be deemed as anti-competitive," McCall said.

Google, for example, will drive traffic to a local newspaper site, but makes revenue from that title's content by advertising around it 'at the point of distribution' online, she said.

"We're not making money out of traffic, we have to make money out of content," said McCall.

"There's no real revenue model there [for local media]. All the money is going to the search engine. It is copyrighted content that they're taking (…) but taking it off Google would be unbelievably damaging. We'd be cutting off our reach and therefore our influence.

"It's about aggregators and search engines in the digital economy - what is the fair rate at the point of consumption for use of our content?

"Search engines exist because they aggregate content and the content creators in journalism don't get rewarded in any way at the moment."

McCall said the committee should look at aggregators' relationships with local news providers as one part of a range of new business models for local media in the UK.

Fellow panellists Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror, and John Fry, chief executive of Johnston Press, also urged the committee to consider the role of council newspapers in local media's decline and how consolidation and relaxation of merger rules for local newspapers could help regional news groups.

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).