News: California Journalism Preservation Act gets an overhaul
A hearing on new changes to AB 886 is set for June 25.
It’s looking increasingly likely California lawmakers will send at least one major journalism jobs bill to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk this year.
Today, state lawmakers have unveiled significant amendments to one of the bills, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ Assembly Bill 886, also known as the California Journalism Preservation Act.
CJPA introduces an arbitration mechanism that could require monopolistic tech platforms like Google and Meta to pay news publishers for scraping journalists’ work to feed the platforms’ own generative AI models, among other uses. In turn, news publishers are required to reinvest these funds into paying the journalists producing the work.
The incoming amendments will localize benefits to California newsrooms, incentivize employing journalists rather than producing clickbait, and shift a larger share of overall funding toward smaller newsrooms. A hearing date on the changes is set for June 25 in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
On behalf of my union, Media Guild of the West — which represents rank-and-file NewsGuild-CWA journalists in Southern California, who voted unanimously to support this bill last year — I have been involved in discussions over these amendments for the past several months and support the changes.
Here are a couple of the newsiest developments, which are both outlined in Section 3273.81:
Payments from Google will be based solely on how many journalists a news publisher employs, not on clicks. Small publishers with five or fewer employees can claim $40k on editorial spending on natural persons (including freelancers) as equivalent to one journalist for the purpose of qualifying for compensation. “Ghost” newsrooms or AI mills with zero journalists get zero dollars.
News publishers’ eligibility for Google payments has been significantly narrowed to qualify only those journalists who produce news primarily for California audiences — i.e., local journalists. Before, the bill qualified any publisher that produced journalism that Californians consume. That meant every national news organization, including huge ones based in New York, would have qualified for funding under this bill, since Californians read everything. Now, if a publisher doesn’t produce local news for Californians, they don’t get anything.
There are some other logistical amendments related to the arbitration and payment mechanisms in the bill that may be of interest to publishers and legal specialists. One percent of the overall Google payment pool to all publishers would be set aside exclusively for the smallest publishers who would receive less than $25,000 under the terms above.
What’s still missing: The overall sum Google would pay publishers, which is likely to be subject to fierce lobbying and negotiation over the course of this summer.
A similar law in Canada, C-18, which CJPA now increasingly resembles, resulted in an agreement with Google last year to pay Canadian publishers $100 million annually, which reportedly pencils out to about $17,000 per journalist to be paid to smaller Canadian publishers in the coming months.
My take:
In my own community and across Southern California, I’ve been watching local news publishers as varied as LAist, KCRW, L.A. Taco and Long Beach Post significantly cut local news coverage over the past year as almost every kind of local news model runs into a wall. While I was the L.A. Times Guild bargaining chair, I had to negotiate the layoffs of about 150 of my coworkers at L.A. Times over the past year, where the newsroom has shrunk about 40% since 2019.
CJPA would substantially benefit journalists in all of these newsrooms and many more like them in California — big, small, for-profit, nonprofit, newspaper, broadcaster, online-only alike.
CJPA is also the most transparent and labor-friendly version of this family of legislation to appear anywhere in the world, thanks to the advocacy of California’s strong journalist unions.
I’ve read a lot of the opposing arguments to this sort of legislation — many offered in good faith, while some seem more like products of Big Tech’s creepy antiregulatory influence efforts. I have not found those opposing arguments persuasive.
Here is a summary of the systemic problems faced by local journalism in 2024, as I currently understand them:
The public still likes and benefits from local journalism but prefers to get journalism from lots of places and preferably for free.
The local advertising dollars that once supported the salaries of local journalists necessary to do this sort of journalism no longer go to the newsrooms that employ those journalists.
Those advertising dollars instead have been captured by the same massive tech platforms that now also deliver a lion’s share of local journalism to the public.
Regular internet users rely on these massive tech platforms every day and will continue to do so because these platforms are still the most convenient way to index and navigate the ever-growing chaos of information that users encounter online.
These platforms have little incentive to subsidize the wages of the journalists whose work these platforms distribute. For years, publishers unhappy with their placement on platforms beyond their control — such as Google, which has long controlled 90% of the search market — have faced the lose-lose prospect of either making their journalism invisible to the same public the journalism is being created for, or bending over backwards to lard journalists’ work with junky search-engine optimization methods to preserve the work’s visibility.
This one-sided market relationship is now deteriorating further as these same platforms engage in an arms race to create generative AI summaries and other methods that extract journalists’ labor, while displacing the hyperlinks that once directed users back to the original journalism on which those summaries are based. Referral traffic for many publishers, in turn, has gone into what could be a terminal decline — a condition some call Google Zero.
With publishers decreasingly able to afford the salaries of journalists or able to entice sponsors for a decreasingly visible product, layoffs and consolidation will continue in commercial and nonprofit newsrooms alike, if not ending in outright liquidation; journalists will continue to leave their home markets or the profession entirely as wages stagnate (if not decline outright); investors will take fewer risks on news startups or existing newsrooms that seek to reach underserved or untapped audiences; the philanthropists now rushing in to help will soon conclude that funding journalism jobs is a worse return on investment than other needy civic development projects; internet users will get ever-worse information in response to their platform queries without ever really understanding why; and the loyal customers that news publishers have left will face ever-rising prices for local news in the form of stricter paywalls and pricier subscriptions, often for a deteriorating product.
Thusly deprived of high-quality information necessary for informed debate, the democracy suffers.
All of this is why I find the most common philosophical arguments against CJPA to lack sufficient explanatory power for diagnosing journalism’s economic problems.
“CJPA is a link tax; publishers benefit more from referral traffic than they lose.” Obviously CJPA isn’t a tax (or the bill would be appearing in a tax committee). But everyone in journalism’s bigger problem right now is that the poor hyperlink increasingly looks like an artifact of the 20th century going extinct all on its own, just like the file directory. We’re all watching AI developers at Google kill referral traffic to publishers big and small in real time in favor of something far more extractive of journalists’ time and energy. (My view of AI’s collision with fair use is that the exploitation of labor is a far clearer explanation for what’s happening than the exploitation of a trillion tiny splinters of copyright.) Journalists, like all content creators, create economic value for Google, which reported $46 billion in Search revenue last quarter. But due to Google’s size and bargaining power, the value of journalists’ labor can’t be assessed accurately at a firm-by-firm level without a sectoral bargaining table, which CJPA effectively creates between platforms and publishers, with all the drama and lockout/boycott threats that collective bargaining entails.
“A platform tax like SB 1327 is more preferable.” I strongly support both bills and have argued we should pass both into law. That said, with both bills on the table in California, lawmakers seem to have stronger skepticism about the nature and impact of a tax mechanism to fund journalism jobs than they do with a narrower bargaining bill. It will take work to overcome those concerns, and I do hope those concerns are overcome. But for all the reasons I outlined above, I don’t think the mechanical and philosophical differences between SB 1327 and AB 886’s approaches are significant enough to justify passing nothing if lawmakers decide one of the two valid frameworks is more viable than the other.
“Journalism is being killed by hedge funds more than Big Tech.” Some of the nastiest cuts in my region are happening at civic-minded public broadcasters, nonprofit publishers and the family-owned L.A. Times. Even if you run a Wall Street publisher out of town on a rail (like the Guild did at the Times) in favor of a more community-oriented or worker-owned newsroom, the lesson we learned at The Times is that massive, extractive platforms are still standing between your journalism and the public.
“State intervention is less preferable than having philanthropy step up.” Like any investor, foundations are rational capital allocators who aren’t prone to giving their limited dollars to projects where they think the money is going to get lit on fire with little to show for it. Even if journalism switches to a social-democratic public-funding model, journalism is still subject to rational allocation arguments during legislative contestation. (Why should the state use its tax dollars this year to fund more journalists instead of better schools? etc.)
“This is protectionism, and protectionism is bad. If journalism isn’t profitable, we should let it die like any other industry.” Journalism is a public good. If libertarians want to live in a country without strong independent media, I strongly encourage them to consider Hungary. Even if you don’t like journalism you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
That said, I think CJPA is only the first step on a much longer staircase of reforms necessary to ensure the robust local media that a democracy like ours requires.
If the argument is that CJPA doesn’t solve all of journalism’s problems, I wholeheartedly agree. This is a beginning, not an end.
Very helpful update, Matt. Thanks!
And as someone who was an AB886 skeptic, I think this is a vastly improved bill.