By now, you are probably already familiar with my ongoing journalistic persecution of Google’s nonsensical proposal to avoid antimonopoly regulation in California by chipping a few bucks and some AI at local newsrooms. Not a single organization of California journalists supports the proposed deal, including my own Guild, which was heavily involved with the underlying bill that got tossed, AB 886. And if you’re anything like me, over the past month you haven’t read a word printed about all this that hasn’t left you more perplexed.
Today’s addition to the canon of befuddlement is a Los Angeles Times story by Jenny Jarvie with new details about how the Google proposal came together, with Assemblymember Buffy Wicks tapping former Sen. Bob Hertzberg to take charge of brokering conversations between Google, news publishers and Governor Newsom.
As it should be increasingly clear to everyone, there isn’t actually a “deal” here as we’d normally think of one, but what we might call concepts of a plan. In the Times story, UC Berkeley has now gone public with the fact that it hasn’t actually agreed to host the critical 501(c)3 fund to distribute the Google/state money and might not agree to do so. That’s contrary to the original claims of UC President Michael V. Drake that “the University and specifically the UC Berkeley School of Journalism stand ready to support this endeavor.”
Today, it turns out that the UC Berkeley School of Journalism very specifically does not stand ready to support this endeavor. The school has some pointed questions and demands about this endeavor, actually — including an “assurance that the state will continue funding the school’s California Local News Fellowship and give it seats on the journalism fund’s board,” per the Times story, with outgoing J-school dean Geeta Anand saying “UC leaders would take part only if they felt assured that the fund would have a significant effect on California journalism. ‘The journalism school would really like to help support a state effort to transform local news,” Anand said. ‘So much more is needed.... This is truly just a start.’ ”
For her part, Assemblymember Wicks told The Times that she’s open to these modifications, which suggests the door is also open for others — yet another signal that, come budget time next session, everybody in the highly fractious media community will be banging on the door to join the big kids’ bargaining table where the original mess got made.
Even the big kids are unhappy: The dysfunctional California News Publishers Association has now also stepped forward in the new Times story to publicly litigate its own unmet demands from the backroom negotiations, particularly over the weird “AI accelerator” that Google would fund and control. That’s probably something our state’s legacy publisher lobby should have mentioned from the get-go instead of halfheartedly welcoming Google’s proposal as a “positive development” and “a meaningful step toward supporting local journalism.” In our business, you have to say what you mean the first time.
All these inevitable demands for amendments in the California budget process next year — undoubtedly including many from the state’s journalism unions and membership organizations — will probably be an unpleasant and unsatisfying exercise given the amount of money on offer, which is far too small for a state as vast as California. It’s not much fun dividing crumbs when you’re starving.
Nonetheless, as much as those of us in journalism’s trenches will remorselessly throw rocks at our employers for their fecklessness in this saga, or at Big Tech for its own role in stripping our newsrooms for parts, Newsom was really the central figure who undermined the pursuit of the real money — AB 886 and its taxation-based counterpart, Sen. Steve Glazer’s SB 1327. “No way was the governor going to sign either of the bills,” Hertzberg said in a previous story. “He viewed them as a tax.” This is a place where the bills’ bipartisan supermajorities in their respective houses of origin weren’t any help: The California legislature hasn’t overriden a gubernatorial veto in more than 40 years.
For Newsom’s part, his office has clearly become sensitive to the obviously justifiable perceptions he’s under the thumb of California’s home-grown tech monopolies. “This is a compromise,” Robert Salladay, Newsom’s senior advisor of communications, told The Times. “The governor is part of and approved a deal that will benefit the California news industry by a quarter of a billion dollars. No other state has done anything close to that. How does that mean he’s kowtowing to Google?” (Here’s about 4,000 words on how I think Newsom kowtowed to Google and created an inflated “quarter billion” figure.)
But there were a couple of lines in the new Times story that signaled Newsom’s particular interests in the media spending side of the equation: When the legislation was pending, Newsom “wondered why the state should force Big Tech to bail out some of the state’s biggest news owners.” Now with a deal done that now stakes taxpayer dollars alongside Google’s for those same news owners, Newsom “may require companies to spend the money on new hires,” having originally hailed the framework — falsely, in my estimation — as something that would provide “funding to support hundreds of new journalists.”
First off, if the governor didn’t want Big Tech monopoly money going to California’s biggest publishers, that’s probably something the governor should have mentioned sometime earlier in Assemblymember Wicks’ two-year legislative crusade to return Big Tech monopoly money to all sorts of newsrooms, most principally the ones that employ the most local journalists in California.
But more significantly: The governor wants new journalism jobs! Everybody loves the idea of local newsrooms hiring more journalists. But take it from the news unions representing those journalists at newsrooms big and small, commercial and nonprofit: It’s hard to hire more of us until you stop laying us off first. One of the (several) economic frailties of local news production is that the tech platforms the governor doesn’t want to regulate are the ones that control the advertising dollars that might make local news production more sustainable in the private market. Otherwise newsrooms are stuck playing for elusive subscriber dollars or for charitable grants, with philanthropy already making up a scarily large portion of many nonprofit newsroom incomes relative to earned revenue.
This sort of economic irrationality is how you end up with — as we have now — a decreasing number of digital news startups, stunted pivots away from dwindling legacy revenue sources, more reliance on tax breaks and public dollars, symbiotic and creepy dependency on the Google News Initiative, and greater publisher investments and involvement in lobbying the governments we have to cover. If Newsom wants to create more journalism jobs, he needs to first understand why digital newsrooms haven’t already been creating them at scale — and why serious market regulations, not just crumb subdivision, will be what’s necessary to provide “funding to support hundreds of new journalists.” Senator Glazer’s SB 1327 data-mining tax, for example, would have provided half a billion dollars of refundable tax credits most heavily weighted toward employers that expand their newsrooms instead of shrinking them. But it was the governor’s own opposition that most fatally wounded that idea. Perhaps it looked too much like real change.
How do we get more people to willingly and readily subscribe to publications? What are the potential fundraising opportunities and how should that funding be distributed?