Some lawmakers and journalism-focused organizations are criticizing an agreement reached by search engine giant Google and the State of California this week that aims to provide funding to news outlets in the Golden State.
The agreement calls for Google and the State of California to commit around $250 million over the course of five years to a not-for-profit group operated by the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley. Under the plan, Google will donate at least $15 million in the first year, then at least $10 million each year afterward; California will commit at least $30 million in the first year, then $20 million in each following year.
The agreement comes after some California lawmakers advanced a bill called the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) that would allow news organizations in the state to negotiate payment from “Big Tech” companies, including Google, for the privilege of linking to or otherwise repurposing their online content. Supporters of the law include newsroom unions, who claim Google and Facebook’s online dominance has caused substantial harm to local journalism businesses, whose readership and advertising revenue have experienced declines over the past two decades.
After the CJPA was introduced, Google retaliated by affirming a temporary measure to block links to news websites that are based in the state. (Solano Media, the parent company of The Desk, opposed the CJPA.) The company has participated in an ongoing advertising campaign urging constituents to demand their elected officials reject the CJPA. The bill advanced through committee earlier this month.
Now, the CJPA appears to have stalled out amid the agreement between Google and California. Some supporters of the CJPA, including CalMatters CEO Neil Chase, who urged members of the trade association Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION) to support the pact. Chase is a member of LION’s board; LION is eligible to receive money through the partnership.
“I just don’t know that this industry should be in the position of saying no to any help it can get,” Chris Krewson, the President of LION, told CalMatters in an interview. “And I don’t think it makes us more or less reliant than we already have been.”
“This is a first step toward what we hope will become a comprehensive program to sustain local news in the long term, and we will push to see it grow in future years,” Julie Makinen, the Chair of the Board of the California News Publishers Association (CNPA), said in a separate statement. In an interview with CalMatters, Makinen affirmed that the pact was “not what we had hoped for when we set out,” but affirmed it “is a start, and it will begin to provide some help to newsrooms across the state.”
Organizations that represent journalists in California are not impressed.
“After two years of advocacy for strong antimonopoly action to start turning around the decline of local newsrooms, we are left almost without words,” the Media Guild of the West said in a statement released on Wednesday. “The publishers who claim to represent our industry are celebrating an opaque deal involving taxpayer funds, a vague AI accelerator project that could very well destroy journalism jobs, and minimal financial commitments from Google to return the wealth this monopoly has stolen from our newsrooms.”
The Media Guild said there were no organizations “representing journalists and news workers” who “agreed to this undemocratic and secretive deal,” and accused Google of being a business that was proactively “destroying our industry.”
The organization sent a letter to the California legislature opposing the deal. The letter was signed by Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce, who serves as the president of the Media Guild of the West; Jon Schleuss, a former Los Angeles Times data journalist who serves as the President of the NewsGuild-CWA; freelance journalist Annie Sciacca; NABET-CWA Local 51 President Carrie Biggs-Adams; NABET-CWA Local 53 President Javad Ayala; NABET-CWA Regional President Kevin Gallo; and Communication Workers of America District 9 VP France Arce.
The unions are staunch supporters of the CJPA, which opponents said was technically flawed because it punished companies like Google and Facebook for behaviors that are common on the open Internet.
“These link taxes violate copyright law by diminishing long-held principles of fair use,” wrote Jeff Jarvis, the author of Buzz Machine and a former television critic.
Jarvis also noted that the CJPA would substantially benefit newsrooms that are owned by corporations and hedge funds, and would do little to help elevate small and rural newsrooms, as well as operations that are minority-owned.
“CJPA would benefit national and even international news media, including hedge-fund owners, far more than California-owned news outlets, leaving little for — and in many cases excluding — community, Black, ethnic, and start-up outlets,” he affirmed.
MediaNews Group, which also operates as Digital First Media and is owned by investment firm Alden Global Capital, published editorials in their local, California-based newspapers urging support for the CJPA when the law was still on the table.
“Local news organizations are victims of these monopolistic practices,” one editorial published this month said. “Google not only curtails our ability to generate advertising dollars, but it also uses our news content to drive web traffic to its search site. Essentially, they’re putting the work product of our journalists on their site and selling advertising with it — and reaping the profits.”
The editorial went on to note that Google “made more than $300 billion last year, most of it from advertising it sells, using content it did not pay for.”
Under the pact reached with the State of California this week, Google will commit a minimum of $122.5 million over five years — or less than 0.5 percent of the revenue it earned in 2023 alone.
