Some good news: States are stepping up for local journalism

A onrush of new legislation to support local news.

If you’d spent your last few years, as I had, in a ferment of professional journalism, trade unionism, antitrust policy and democracy scholarship, you’d be pretty freaked out right now. Your escape pod is in decaying orbit around a dangerous ice planet and the indicators are blinking red. A crash-landing awaits, and the battery on your phaser is running low.

And yet I bring good news! Really!

At the same time the Trump administration and its allies are launching a full-spectrum assault on journalism — harassing journalists, trying to defund your local public radio station, extorting corporate media, turning the FCC into Big Brother, trying to overturn Times v. Sullivan’s libel protections, proposing tariffs on many newspapers’ only source of newsprint, and gutting pro-democracy journalism around the world — state legislatures are stepping up with new, federalist visions of supporting independent journalism on a broad-based and strictly nonpartisan basis.

Right now, state lawmakers across the U.S. are engaging in the most ambitious collective effort to support local journalism since the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The effort isn’t centralized, but the work is connected: Ideas introduced in one state are appearing in others.

Although there are lots of ways public policy can direct economic support to news production, one idea near and dear to my heart has broken out of the pack: broad-based payroll subsidies that make it cheaper for newsrooms to hire and employ journalists.

New York and Illinois enacted journalist employment tax credits last year, and this year California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and New Mexico have taken steps toward implementing generally similar subsidies, though with some pros and cons. Here’s a quick rundown of some varying concepts on similar ideas (opinions here are my own):

• Washington, SB 5400: Establishes the Washington Local News Journalism Corps Program to make grants thought to be worth up to $15,000 for journalists covering civic affairs in underserved communities. PROs: Would be funded by expanding an existing surcharge tax on advanced computing companies (like Microsoft and Amazon). CONs: Probably gives too much discretion to the state Commerce Department director to decide which newsrooms get grants and which don’t. The United Faculty of Washington State is opposed over concerns their existing funding could be hurt.

• New Mexico, SB 110 and SB 111: $4 million annually in employment tax credits for local journalists and news printing workers through 2030. PROs: Creates several years of broad-based funding with likely minimal administrative headache. CONs: Could use some small mechanical refinements (publicly traded news companies are excluded for taxpayer support but not private equity, for example), and the lack of a longer-term dedicated pay-for will invite local publishers into the lobbying arena to maintain future subsidy.

• Illinois, SB 1732: A copycat of the failed California Journalism Preservation Act, a framework that would require Google and Meta to pay news outlets for scraping their journalism. PROs: “Bargaining code” bills like these are the news industry’s home-run swings against the Big Tech ad duopoly, which has been a high-risk, high-reward approach elsewhere around the world. CJPA was the version of these bills that promised the most transparency and the most aggressive emphasis on local journalism jobs. CONs: These bills pick at the news industry’s biggest political sore spots between large and small publishers; internet lobbies are extremely ideological about the value arguments underlying the funding mechanism; collective bargaining with Big Tech means inviting Big Tech to threaten lockouts as a bargaining tactic, and if the governor isn’t behind you, you’ll probably get your ass kicked. My old Guild suggested some ideas for how this framework could be improved upon.

• Oregon, SB 686: Another CJPA copycat bill, but with an unusual option for Big Tech to opt out of paying news publishers by donating to a university-run Civic Information Consortium to improve the quantity and quality of civic information in communities in Oregon. PROs: I actually think this one is too undercooked to say something nice about at the moment. CONs: These are collective bargaining frameworks, and it’s a little weird and unfair to ask journalists to bear the risk of platform bans for the purpose of funding somebody else’s thing.

• New York, Senate Bill S4401: The third pending state-level bargaining code bill that I’m aware of. PROs: Similar to Oregon, this one is too undercooked to say much nice about. CONs: S4401 seems to have emerged trapped in amber, as if buried in Triassic bedrock during the years of political wrangling following Australia’s first-generation bargaining code. There’s no transparency, no focus on jobs, and no focus on local news.

• Hawaii, HB 1458: Would create a social media digital advertising tax to fund broadband access and local journalism initiatives. PROs: We love creating a steady pay-for to fund journalism stuff, and broadband access is a genuine problem in some lower-income communities. CONs: There’s not much fleshed-out about this bill yet — what kind of local journalism initiatives? Also the politics of creating digital advertising taxes is insanely hard. There’s every reason to believe monopolistic platforms will just pass through the price increases onto the local businesses on the other side of those ad buys, and it’s already-exploited small business owners that the platform companies will march up to the capitol to ask why their elected leaders are hiking prices on Main Street. The bill also targets any social media platform with a million users in the U.S., which is, I dunno, all of them? That’s a lot of huge corporate enemies to take on at once.

On the upside, even though I just said a bunch of skeptical stuff, bill introductions like these are welcome starting points that provoke conversations that lead to amendments or better frameworks. If anyone had the perfect solution to the crisis in local journalism, we’d all already know it. But exactly because nobody in the news industry has come close to winning these arguments yet, an open approach to policymaking will be needed, especially as the world continues to rapidly change around us.