My interview with Adam Conover + California Senate testimony on the local news crisis
Will California introduce a digital ad tax to fund local journalism?
I had a blast talking to interviewer, expert explainer and fellow friend of labor Adam Conover on the latest episode of his show “Factually!”
We talked about the crisis in local journalism, the importance of unions, the dangers of tech and media consolidation, plus a bunch of other stuff including the dehumanizing power of AI. You can catch the interview on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and support Adam on his Patreon here.
One of the things I talked about is how the immediate future of local journalism is likely smaller and community-oriented, which is another way of saying that the future of journalism is going to be brutal for a lot of the humans who remain. The top YouTube comment, from StainedGlassDemon, says it all:
I'm the editor at my local newspaper, in my early 30's. I'm severely overworked and underpaid. I do the layout, run the social media, the website and I do a majority of the writing. I have a single full time writer for one of my three newspapers. Everyone else is aging out of the business and nobody new wants to work for newspapers because of how poorly it pays. I've felt so trapped and I only see it getting worse. I have people consistently telling me to my face that social media is where they get the news and that newspapers aren't worth it. We need journalists. Thank you so much for making this video.
What about a digital ad tax in California to support local journalism?
Meanwhile, I write to you from Sacramento, where I was just invited to testify in front of the California Senate Committee on Revenue and Taxation on behalf of my Guild.
The committee chair, Sen. Steve Glazer, is contemplating proposing a digital advertising tax or a similar measure that might reroute revenues from tech giants like Google, Meta and Amazon toward local newsrooms.
Such a bill would be introduced in parallel to Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ pending California Journalism Preservation Act, which awaits hearing in front of the California Senate Judiciary Committee.
Here’s what I had to say about that. My remarks as prepared (I improvised in the live testimony):
Senators,
Thank you for the invitation to address this committee. My name is Matt Pearce, and I am the president of Media Guild of the West. We are a local union of The NewsGuild-CWA that represents journalists at newsrooms in Southern California, Arizona and Texas.
Every day, millions of Californians rely on journalism produced by NewsGuild members. We work for many of the state’s newspapers – such as the San Francisco Chronicle – and at nonprofit newsrooms like CalMatters. I was a longtime reporter for the Los Angeles Times up until a few weeks ago, when I took a buyout as part of the latest major job cut to our newsroom, which has shrunk roughly 40% since 2019.
We deeply appreciate your interest in the emergency facing local journalists. I urge you to think in terms of billions with a B, not millions, if you’re thinking about what’s necessary to offset the economic losses and massive job cuts to California newsrooms over the past two decades. In our industry, many for-profit and nonprofit newsrooms face the same headwinds and have cut local journalism jobs, with obvious risks to the health of our democracy.
My own NewsGuild local has not developed a position specifically regarding a digital advertising tax. It’s an issue we’ll study, and we’re open to conversations about it. The local news crisis is so dire that we tend to have a “yes, and” approach to good ideas that would help local journalists. It’s not inconsistent for us to support Assemblymember Wicks’ California Journalism Preservation Act and also support other well designed bills designed to support local journalists.
In recent years, a growing body of academic research suggests that newspaper closures and the loss of local journalism jobs have been associated with many hidden costs in our communities, including higher municipal borrowing rates, higher interest spreads in local bank loans, and measurable declines in civic engagement. These sorts of costs should be included in any further research on the impact of tax relief for local journalism jobs given the evidence that our communities may already be bearing economic costs from newsroom closures.
The NewsGuild and our parent union, the Communications Workers of America, tend to support the type of tax frameworks proposed by Mr. [Steve] Waldman and the Rebuild Local News coalition. Those include ideas like tax credits encouraging the hiring and retention of journalists on a broad-based and nondiscriminatory basis.
California has had experience and success using tax policy to promote employment and retain production in another business sector vital to our state. The California Film and Television Tax Credit Program has included a production incentive designed to support the employment of below-the-line film workers in California. Research by the L.A. County Economic Development Corporation has credited that program with supporting more than 110,000 jobs in California between 2015 and 2020, and it has managed to do so without violating the U.S. Constitution’s dormant Commerce Clause.
By membership resolution, my local also supports well designed initiatives to publicly fund public-interest journalism. But as president, in my brief experience as a somewhat idealistic advocate for California journalists over the last couple of years, I’ve become more skeptical of grant programs in particular. Senator Glazer, you may remember that my local took a support-if-amended position on your Senate Bill 911 a couple years ago, which would have created a state grant program for public-interest journalism. I still feel pretty good about where that bill was headed with some incoming amendments to address the ethical concerns we had. But ultimately I was disturbed to already see infighting between publishers who were going to be competing with each other for a limited number of discretionary grants from the state.
If the state is going to provide some sort of economic support for newsrooms, it would be preferable that public support promotes good behavior by everybody, on a neutral, consistent and predictable basis, rather than hand-picking winners and losers year after year. That kind of discretion seems like a recipe for incentivizing newsrooms and news companies to lobby for special treatment for themselves instead of sticking to general advocacy over the structural issues that affect our industry as a whole.
The creation of the Berkeley journalism school’s fellowship program for early career journalists was a good solution, since that fellowship is administered by experienced journalism educators. But again, we’re talking about providing training and support to young journalists by placing them in professional newsrooms that in many cases are likely not going to be able to afford to keep them on board when their temporary state funding ends.
The $25 million that the legislature invested in the Berkeley fellowship is thought to be the largest state allocation anywhere in the U.S., ever, to support local journalism. But that historic investment is dwarfed by the $30 to $40 million that the Los Angeles Times reportedly lost in 2023 alone. I’ve lost far more coworkers in the past year than the Berkeley program is budgeted to employ across the whole state. And that’s in a single newsroom.
That’s why we have to think much bigger. Again, I thank the committee for your time and look forward to your efforts to support local journalism in California.