Newspapers are dying. That’s old news. What’s new is that in California, they may be on some state life support.
State legislation is brewing that would force the largest online platforms like Google to spend money to help save journalism. After all, these platforms are responsible for the downfall of many news outlets.
It’s not just newspapers that are in dangerous decline. This is mostly news coverage – print, broadcast and even digital.
In Washington, Sacramento and every city and town, the profession of gathering the factual information citizens need to hold their elected representatives and government accountable is in financial crisis.
Strong journalism is an essential component of a healthy democracy. Weak journalism leads to a sick democracy.
This is a stark example of what’s happening today, with misinformation filling the communication gap left by the weakening of factual news:
Millions of Americans actually believe Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. There is no reliable evidence for this pathetic loser’s fabrication. But Trump followers ignore the decline of objective news media and reaffirm their faith in echo chambers like Fox News.
Most government and political writers essentially want to cut through the bullshit and provide the public with straight facts in an easily digestible way. If there is an agenda, it is not ideological. This is to get to the homepage or top of the website.
But journalism is a declining profession because it has traditionally been funded largely by advertising. This is collapsing thanks to the internet.
Basically, large online platforms gobble up news outlets’ products and run them without paying for them, building their own advertising programs around the stolen articles. Or they just copy the information and create their own posts. This is the scary future of artificial intelligence.
Newspaper advertising has dried up. Due to the actions of the platforms, revenue is increasingly not replaced by online advertising.
Additionally, when you use Google to buy a pair of shoes online, your data is collected by the platform and sold to other shoe companies. Soon you’ll be inundated with shoe ads online. Shoe companies see no reason to advertise in newspapers or on local television.
Advertising dollars used to pay journalists’ salaries have been hemorrhaging for years. About two-thirds of California journalists have lost their jobs over the past two decades. In January, more than 100 employees were laid off from the New York Times newsroom.
To their credit, some lawmakers are trying to stand up to powerful platforms and throw a lifeline to the media.
Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) is pushing a bill, AB 886, that would be similar to laws enacted in Australia and Canada. This will require large platforms to pay news outlets for their products. Fees will be determined through arbitration. News organizations will be required to spend at least 70% of their funds on journalists.
The bill passed the Assembly last year but has yet to pass the Senate.
Key lawmakers have agreed to pass some bills this summer but have yet to decide on their specific content. They are working to craft legislation that would struggle to gain two-thirds of the legislative vote, be accepted by the big platform and get the signature of Gov. Gavin Newsom. The governor has remained silent.
The four are Wicks, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Tom Umberg (D-Orange County), new Senate Majority Leader Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) and Senator Steve Gray Ze (D-Olinda), the author of the second press relief bill.
“We have experienced a hollowing out of newsrooms on an unprecedented scale that has dramatically undermined the government’s ability to conduct oversight,” said Glazer, a former political press secretary.
I asked the veteran police officer if he had noticed a decrease in coverage at the state Capitol. “Of course,” he replied. “There are great reporters. But the amount of behavior that goes on at the Capitol that goes unchallenged is staggering.
Over the past two decades, the size of the Capitol press corps — including the New York Times bureau — has shrunk by two-thirds.
Glazer’s bill, SB 1327, would impose a “data extraction mitigation fee,” a sales tax, on platforms that earn more than $2.5 billion annually from advertising to Californians. It will surpass Google, Amazon and Meta, generating $1 billion in annual revenue.
Forty percent would go to schools — a move that helped build political support for the bill.
Half of that amount — $500 million — would provide tax credits for journalists’ salaries. For full-time news employees at The Times and other large and medium-sized newspapers, the credit is 30% of the salary; for small newspapers with up to five employees, the credit is 55% of the new employee’s salary.
I called the publisher of the Ojai Valley News, a print weekly with two full-time reporters and four half-time staff.
“Something really needs to be done to save independent newspapers,” said publisher Laura Rearwin Ward. “Journalists can be offered better salaries if done well. I don’t see why journalists should live in poverty. This business can’t afford to pay them a fair wage. They do it for love.”
I also called the person in charge at the other end of the newspaper world: Chris Argentieri, president and chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Times, which has a news staff of about 400.
“We created a lot of very important intellectual property that is spread all over the world,” Argentieri told me. “It doesn’t make sense that a company can take our product and not compensate us.”
He added that news organizations are not big enough to deal with powerful platforms, and those platforms won’t negotiate. “The government is the only entity that can stand up to Google,” he said.
I asked him about the future of newspapers. His formula: great products that people will buy, digital subscriptions, charitable help and public sector support.
The two bills pending in the Legislature will likely (hopefully) be combined in some way.
Unless the government takes on the modern robber barons, most legitimate news coverage will probably be “-30-“. This was a sign of “the end” in old news copy.
