Slate podcast: "Can California save local journalism?"
An interview with host Lizzie O’Leary on Slate’s “What Next: TBD” podcast.
Happy Sunday, everyone!
Earlier this week, I talked to Lizzie O’Leary for Slate’s “What Next: TBD” podcast about what’s been going wrong with how we pay for journalism and what Big Tech has to do with it. You can catch the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the web and other players here.
It’s a broader conversation about some of the forces that have been eroding journalism jobs in our own communities; the more exploitative turn that the A.I.-powered internet is now taking; and why interventions like California Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ California Journalism Preservation Act and Senator Steve Glazer’s Senate Bill 1327 are necessary:
PEARCE: I think the Internet that we grew up with, for those of us born in the 20th century, the Internet of hyperlinks, where you just sat in a browser and you sort of coasted from website to website … I think that Internet is going away. We’re no longer sort of like hunter-gatherers of the information, coasting around from news site to news site, typing in nytimes.com in the browser and going and seeing what’s on the homepage.
If you’re listening to the show right now, think about how you use your phone. How often are you using apps instead of a browser already? This is the direction of Internet development, is to park people in one place. Meta just introduced on its services, in Instagram, AI-assisted search. So the idea of leaving Instagram, Meta’s trying to make that harder.
O’LEARY: Sure. They want to keep you in their product universe.
PEARCE: Yes, because you could sell more ads against it. We’re building a bigger and better and more perfect casino. And that is really great if you’re Meta, that is really great if you’re Google. These companies are developing, right out in the open, a different kind of Internet where you don’t really go anywhere. You just sit on their services and they will still bring journalism of a form to you, whether it’s attributed to those journalists or those outlets or not — it will seem to come to you anyway.
And I think that’s part of the bigger problem here, is that not only has the relationship between journalism and Big Tech become unbalanced, we’ve gotten to a point where even the pretense that journalists and news publishers were getting something out of this exchange of referral traffic and social media traffic from Facebook and Google searches — like, they’re already building a different kind of Internet where they’ll take from your work, and they’ll summarize it for users, and then that’ll be that.
And that’s what this sort of legislation tries to address.
O’LEARY: Part of me wonders if this bill is, you know, a bit of wishcasting from publishers who ignored that the Internet, most notably Facebook and Google, were eating their lunch in terms of ad revenue, like some way to rectify a mistake that they made.
PEARCE: Well, if you’re going to tell me that publishers made bad business decisions, as the president of a labor union, I’m going to agree with you. Nobody loves mocking and ridiculing and criticizing news publishers more than I do. And God knows that there are a lot of them that have made some really bad mistakes, and that’s why we exist and why we yell at them.
But the issue is that I find it hard to believe — the skeptic in me finds it hard to believe — the idea that a sector-wide failure of so many different types of news companies, across so many different types of mediums, with so many different management teams, with so many different editorial focuses, making so many different business decisions, could all arrive at the same location of failure.
That, to me, says that there is a systemic issue here.