California unveils a second major journalism jobs bill
California Sen. Steve Glazer is proposing a data-mining fee on Big Tech to fund $500 million in journalism jobs. Let's do it.
Right about now, California Sen. Steve Glazer is unveiling a bill to impose a data-mining fee on Big Tech to fund $500 million in local journalism jobs a year. Click for the livestream announcement and the bill text for Senate Bill 1327.
I support this bill, strongly. And you should too. Other democracies publicly fund journalism at levels vastly higher than we do in the U.S.; this is a way to do it that places the funding burden on the biggest firms raking in massive advertising profits. Decades ago, those dollars once supported tens of thousands of local journalists who worked in the public interest. Now, they don’t.
The centerpiece of Glazer’s bill is a journalism jobs tax credit that gives news companies a break based on how many journalists they employ. It’s got great incentives: If you are a smaller publisher, if you offer benefits, if you pay your journalists decently, if you’ve hired journalists recently, the size of your dollar benefit is bigger. If you’re a larger publisher, if you don’t offer benefits, if you pay your journalists like crap, your dollar benefit is smaller. Spending on freelancers is credited too, at a level that supports their work without accidentally incentivizing the Uberization of staff labor.
Just as good, the benefit is available to a wide range of journalism providers regardless of medium or viewpoint, which minimizes bureaucratic hurdles to get the benefit and decreases the risk of government favoritism, discrimination or corruption.
Since Glazer’s bill, SB 1327, is focused on data mining on users — whenever you use Facebook, you’re bartering away your private information so you can be advertised to — companies like Google and Meta can’t easily try to evade compliance by trying to ban journalism on their services.
Glazer’s proposal is now the second bill in California’s senate that proposes Big Tech should be paying its fair share to support local journalism in the state, alongside Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ California Journalism Preservation Act.
These are both journalism jobs bills; both bills are supported by my union, The NewsGuild; and both bills, if passed, would almost certainly mark the largest-ever state-level investment in local journalism in American history.
So let’s pass both! The time has long ended to nibble around the edges of journalism policy. A different kind of internet is already upon us — one even more hostile to support the work of journalists — and we should accommodate its arrival with new ways to sustain the journalism our communities rely upon.
I sent my (long) analysis of Glazer’s bill to his Senate Revenue and Taxation committee last week, attached below.
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Re: Senate Bill 1327 (Glazer) – Feedback
Dear Chair Glazer and members of the California Senate Revenue and Taxation Committee,
I write to you as the president of Media Guild of the West, a local union of The NewsGuild-CWA that represents hundreds of journalists and media workers at the Los Angeles Times, Southern California News Group, Desert Sun and Long Beach Post in Southern California, as well as hundreds more members in newsrooms across Arizona and Texas. We work at commercial and nonprofit newsrooms large and small. We are affiliated with Communications Workers of America District 9 and the California Federation of Labor.
Our Guild represents journalists, not the businesses they work for; over the past six months,we have engaged in work stoppages at every California publisher where wework. In our policy advocacy, we strive to support the common good of journalists across California, union and non-union alike. By rule, we do not endorse, oppose or make contributions to candidates for office.
I am a resident of Los Angeles and a longtime journalist who recently departed the Los Angeles Times after 11 years of service. The following feedback is based on a discussion draft of proposed amendments to Senate Bill 1327, introduced by Senator Glazer.
OVERVIEW
In April 2023, journalist members of Media Guild of the West voted unanimously in support of a resolution to “support efforts by their local union to engage in advocacy addressing the tech industry’s market power and the potential abuse of artificial intelligence models. The Guild will support measures such as the California Journalism Preservation Act (AB 886, Wicks) and similar bills on the condition that such measures serve the public interest and support the protection or creation of journalism jobs.”
At the time, we stated that “while we support and embrace new technologies as journalists, recent artificial intelligence models raise concerns that our work could be exploited for commercial gain without rightful compensation for the human labor – our labor – that’s still necessary to produce accurate, rigorous, ethical journalism about what’s new in the world,” adding further, “we support a broad range of commercial and noncommercial policy discussions to address the journalism crisis, and the public must have confidence that policy interventions are undertaken in pursuit of the public good, not out of political favoritism or private gain.”
To that end, I would like to thank Senator Glazer and staff for developing an innovative journalism policy framework in the discussion draft, which appears to preemptively address many of these concerns.
THE PROBLEM
In the U.S., journalism is a public good produced by the private sector, and over the last two decades, much of that private sector has been in a state of continuous collapse. While most of the tens of thousands of local journalism job losses since 2008 have happened at legacy newspapers – like the kind many of us work for – more recent local journalism layoffs have worryingly included major cutbacks in nonprofit newsrooms, public broadcasters and new digital media.
The number of Guild-represented journalists at the Los Angeles Times has declined about 40% since 2019, which has been accompanied locally by major staff reductions at public broadcasters LAist (formerly KPCC) and KCRW over the past year. Following a broader national trend toward nonprofit news management, the Long Beach Post and the Long Beach Business Journal reorganized from for-profit to nonprofit tax status last year under the mantle of the Long Beach Journalism Initiative, but expected philanthropy reportedly failed to materialize. Long Beach journalists unionized with Media Guild of the West amid concerns about mismanagement, and management refused to recognize their union and laid off 60% of the staff in Long Beach’s largest newsroom, who remain out on strike. The independent digital publication L.A. Taco recently furloughed its staff and launched an urgent membership drive to save the newsroom amid dire revenue shortfalls.
We are vocal in calling out predatory corporate ownership or newsroom mismanagement as a major factor in local newsroom layoffs; we aren’t shy about engaging in work stoppages to protest unfair labor practices by our employers. Most of California’s major newsrooms are now unionized, and we urge the public to respect our picket lines wherever they appear.
But the breadth and depth of local journalism job losses across a wide variety of newsrooms and employers is a sign of broader structural issues with how the public interacts with and funds – directly or indirectly – the journalism from which it benefits.
Among the most prominent of these issues is Big Tech’s diversion and monopolization of the advertising revenues that previously supported tens of thousands of local journalism jobs in the 20th century.
“People still consume huge amounts of journalism every day even if they are now more likely to view it through their smartphone or tablet. And advertisers are willing to pay huge sums of money to reach these consumers, in no small measure because they tend to have higher-than-average discretionary income,” writes Phillip Longman, policy director at the Open Markets Institute. “But much of that ad money no longer flows back to the people who produce the journalism, even when the ads appear on their own digital publications. Rather, it flows largely into the vaults of Google, Facebook, and other platforms, increasingly including Amazon, which have inserted themselves as self-dealing middlemen in digital advertising markets.”
The journalism we produce is still helping generate economic value in the form of advertising dollars. But much of those revenues are being captured by companies that don’t employ journalists and will never have to face an unfair labor practice picket line for not sitting across the bargaining table from us when we demand our fair share of the economic value that our work has created. This is a free-rider problem. It’s why many of California’s journalists support Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ California Journalism Preservation Act (Assembly Bill 886), which would return a rightful share of our labor’s economic value to the payrolls of the newsrooms responsible for paying us.
But other changes in the media ecosystem are afoot and have only accelerated since Assemblymember Wicks introduced her bill in 2023.
Meta and Google have each opposed the California Journalism Preservation Act and have threatened to censor our journalism on the companies’ services in California if that bill passes, with each objecting to paying the Wall Street-dominated local news companies that many Guild members work for and bargain with. (On a personal note: As a trade unionist, while I always enjoy public criticism of poorly behaved employers that we frequently picket, I do not view complaints about capitalism coming from $2 trillion companies as especially sincere. We don’t love these publishers either, but in California and many other states, their newsrooms are heavily unionized.)
Meta and Google have made similar threats in other countries seeking to require these titans to pay news publishers for profiting from journalists’ work, and we have been remiss in not more vocally expressing solidarity when Google and Meta first tested these censorship threats against our fellow democracies. Any monopoly not just capable but willing to use journalists around the world as a bargaining chip to bully lawmakers and evade regulation deserves to be confronted.
One reason why these companies may be increasingly willing to engage in political brinkmanship – by threatening the hyperlink-based referral traffic still relied upon by many news publishers – is that Google and Meta have each recently been testing and deploying artificial intelligence features that reduce the risk of users departing their ad-based services via links.
Those of us born in the 20th century might be accustomed to thinking of or experiencing the internet as a place of hyperlinks, where users prowl from site to site, actively hunting for information across an open web. But in more recent years, a different kind of surveillance-powered internet has been taking shape, one increasingly based on opaque recommendation algorithms featuring platform-native content (see: TikTok) or generative A.I. summaries that reduce the need – or even the ability – for users to visit a news publisher’s website via hyperlink. Consider the A.I. summary that one journalist recently encountered of her own work on Google Search:
In some respects, the growth of a more passive, algorithmic- and summary-based internet, less reliant on hyperlinks or traditional news stories, could be a natural response to the social media revolution of the 2010s, where the proliferation of publishing tools dramatically increased the amount of content available to consumers.
News consumers today say they prefer to get news from social media for convenience even though they also say they’re increasingly overwhelmingly concerned about the content’s accuracy. After Meta banned journalism in Canada in 2023 to protest a law requiring payment to news publishers, researchers found that Canadians kept using Meta’s services anyway and evaded Meta’s ban by posting screenshots of stories from censored Canadian outlets, with no drop in engagement.
Hearteningly for journalists, such behavior indicates that modern internet users still want journalism despite extraordinary changes in the media consumer environment. But troublingly, it also indicates the public is less willing or able to travel across hyperlinks to get it, apparently preferring to consume our work via the highly centralized, increasingly A.I.-powered and decreasingly hyperlink-based platforms still profiting from our labor without helping foot the bill.
This is where Senate Bill 1327 would come in.
A DURABLE FRAMEWORK
The S.B. 1327 discussion draft addresses the heart of the economic exchange between massive platforms and the kind of user behavior described above, which would likely remain unchanged in any transition from a hyperlink-based internet to a more A.I.-powered internet: “The largest internet corporations use their control of essential online platforms to extract personal data which they use to generate enormous economic rents. This personal data is highly valuable, as demonstrated by the massive profit these corporations make using this information to sell digital advertisements.”
In threatening to evade laws like the proposed California Journalism Preservation Act and others like it, Meta and Google appear to presume that the censorship of hyperlinks to news content might nullify their economic obligations to publishers or governments under the law. Whether such evasion is based on a valid legal premise in each jurisdiction is likely for regulators or the courts to find.
But a levy on users’ implicit barter of their private information to enable platforms’ surveillance-based advertising systems does not appear to be reliant on the precise nature to which those platforms choose to crawl, ingest, display or synthesize our journalism – via hyperlinks, algorithmic ingestion or otherwise – perhaps decreasing the ability of platforms to attempt regulatory evasion.
CORRECTLY IDENTIFIES THE PROBLEM; PROVIDES THE RIGHT INCENTIVES
Publishers don’t produce journalism; journalists do. That’s why journalism policy that seeks to support local news production should be principally directed toward supporting journalism jobs and putting newsrooms before boardrooms.
The Data Extraction Mitigation Fee would substantially fund a journalism jobs tax credit that incentivizes journalist employment and rewards good treatment by employers. We welcome these sorts of broad-based structures, as they universalize access to public support for journalism jobs across different types of employers without discriminating based on viewpoint or medium. They also significantly reduce the risk of government favoritism, discrimination or outright corruption that could be created through more discretionary support (like grant programs) that create more opportunities to compromise our journalistic independence.
Smaller publishers with fewer than 10 employees – which includes many of California’s ethnic media publishers – would, appropriately, receive a slightly larger share of support than larger newsrooms with more resources and economies of scale. Freelance journalists, a major part of our industry and the frequent subject of labor abuses, are appropriately recognized and economically supported at a level that would not incentivize workforce fissuring. Employers that provide benefits to their employees would receive more support than those that didn’t. The percentage-based benefit also means that news employers that pay their journalists poorly, like Alden Global Capital, would receive many fewer dollars per capita than other publishers that pay their journalists better.
Historically, it has been the impulse of some outside groups or publishers to ask lawmakers to narrow policy benefits to exclude other publishers, which in this case, would mean reducing the number of journalists who potentially benefit from the legislation. I recommend resisting those sorts of requests. This proposal – which could be by far the largest local journalism jobs support effort in American history, if enacted – is correctly ambitious to the point that lawmakers should be paying closer attention to where surplus funds from this bill might go. I also suggest that more attention be paid to the benefits provided to nonprofit newsrooms, which make up a growing share of journalist employment and deserve to be robustly supported on equal footing.
Best,
Matt Pearce
President, Media Guild of the West
The NewsGuild-CWA local 39213