JOURNALISM – Antitrust and media groups are raising alarms this week over a new agreement between California and Google that undermines two state bills aimed at funding journalism.
Both supporters and critics of the bills – SB 1327 by Senator Steve Glazer (D-7) and AB 886 by Representative Buffy Wicks (D-14), also known as the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) – have expressed concerns about the deal, which Wicks announced Wednesday and which Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom hailed as a “major breakthrough.”
Glazer’s bill would have imposed a 7.25% tax on online advertising revenue to create a tax credit for California newsrooms, while the CJPA would have required platforms to give a portion of their advertising revenue to media outlets for use of their content. Big tech companies strongly opposed both proposals.
Negotiators agreed to commit nearly $250 million in private and public funding over the next five years to create a National AI Accelerator and a News Transformation Fund, which will be managed by the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, said Wicks, who claimed this is “just the beginning.”
As CalMatters reported:
Instead of forcing Google and Meta to negotiate usage fees directly with news organizations, Google would contribute $55 million over five years to a new fund administered by UC Berkeley to be distributed to local newsrooms. The state would provide $70 million over five years. Google would also continue to pay $10 million each year from existing grants to newsrooms.
The legislature and governor would have to approve the state funds each year; the source has not yet been specified. Google would also donate $12.5 million each year to an artificial intelligence “acceleration program,” heightening fears among labor advocates of looming job losses.
The agreement followed more than a year of debate over the bills, during which Google came under fire for conducting tests that “removed links to California news websites that may be covered by the CJPA to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience,” as Jaffer Zaidi, the tech giant’s vice president of global news partnerships, said in April.
While the new plan was praised by officials at CalMatters, local independent online news publishers, OpenAI – which is also part of the agreement – and Google parent company Alphabet, Glazer and various groups issued statements ranging from skeptical to scathing.
“Despite the good intentions of the parties involved, this proposal does not provide enough funding to pull independent newsgathering in California out of its death spiral,” Glazer said in a lengthy statement. “Unfortunately, this agreement seriously undermines our work on a long-term solution to save independent journalism.”
“Absent from this announcement is any support of journalism by Meta and Amazon,” he added. “These platforms have collected sensitive data from Californians without paying for it. Their use of that data for advertising is the harm to news organizations that this agreement is designed to mitigate.”
Charles F. Champion II, president and CEO of the California News Publishers Association, which represents more than 700 newspapers and online publications in the state, was less critical but still not entirely satisfied with the outcome.
“We welcome efforts to bring together resources from the public and private sectors to support local journalism,” he said. “However, we believe the financial commitments from Google and other technology companies should have been more robust, given the significant revenue they generate from distributing journalistic content.”
Seven union leaders – including Matt Pearce, president of the Media Guild of the West – jointly declared: “California’s journalists do not agree to this blackmail” and sent a letter to the state legislature expressing their opposition to what they see as “an undemocratic and secret agreement with one of the companies destroying our industry.”
Ashanti Blaize-Hopkins, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, noted the unions’ opposition and said: “It is worrying that journalists appear to have lost their place at the negotiating table in the negotiations on this initiative.”
“At a minimum, journalists should be included in the implementation of this plan, as it could potentially impact their livelihoods,” Blaize-Hopkins added. “As other states study these efforts to learn how to strengthen local journalism, I hope California’s leaders set an example that centers and honors the contributions of professionals who fight tirelessly to keep the public informed.”
Lee Hepner, senior counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, which supports the CJPA, said Tuesday – before the agreement was officially announced – that “this backroom deal is bad for journalists, publishers and all Californians, which is why state lawmakers, including Governor Newsom, should reject it and go through a transparent legislative process.”
“The fact that a law designed to preserve journalism could be replaced by a Google-funded AI accelerator is not just absurd policy, it’s appalling political action,” Hepner continued. “The fact that this AI deal is supposedly close to being finalized and we don’t yet know the details speaks volumes about who is driving the decision-making process in Sacramento – and it’s not the journalists, publishers or newsrooms whose industries have been undermined by Google’s monopoly.”
After the agreement was reached, Jessica J. González, co-executive director of Free Press Action, whose group opposed the CJPA, said, “We are disappointed with this outcome and this process. Good policy is made in the open, where people can see and participate in the democratic process.”
“This deal, meanwhile, was negotiated behind closed doors between media giants and technology platforms,” she stressed. “As we await final details, it seems clear that the result is an agreement that fails to meet the needs of California’s journalists and communities.”
González continued:
While some newsrooms will benefit from this deal in the short term, the funding is far too meager, the timeframe far too short, and the commitment to locality and diversity far too insufficient. Policymakers must view this outcome as the first step in a much broader process to revitalise and transform local news, not as a viable long-term solution.
Local journalism that helps people understand what is happening in their community and holds the powerful to account is a public good. Local journalists, community publishers, advocacy groups, unions and grassroots activists have worked tirelessly to make this issue a priority for lawmakers.
“We encourage lawmakers to continue to work with these groups, to look beyond short-term measures and to envision the kind of structural policy change needed to truly stabilize and transform our media system,” she added. “That means we must put local publishers, ethnic media and nonprofit newsrooms at the center of any legislative action. These organizations are closest to their communities and are doing incredible work to fill critical information gaps.”
(Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer at Common Dreams, where this article appeared.)
