Google building. (IJ archive)
Imagine you are a pie-maker. You buy the cherries, sugar, flour and other ingredients. You rent space for your industrial kitchen and purchase ovens. You hire bakers. And after your pies are ready, the only grocery store in the area sells them. And keeps the money.
That is a simplified analogy of the story of local journalism today. We’re the pie-makers, and Big Tech companies such as Google and Facebook are the grocery stores. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but, essentially, they’re taking our news product, putting it on their sites and selling advertising with it. And reaping the profits.
Which helps explain why local news operations across California and the nation are struggling to survive. And why California has lost over 100 newspapers in the last decade. It’s time for state lawmakers to change this paradigm — to make Big Tech pay for the journalism it’s using to drive its advertising.
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, is trying to ensure that happens in California. Her legislation, Assembly Bill 866, dubbed the California Journalism Preservation Act, would require online platforms such as Google and Facebook to share the money they make off of local news organizations’ articles.
It’s only fair.
It’s like asking the grocery store to split the profits with you from the pies you bake. Without that split, your business couldn’t survive. And neither can ours.
As more and more people turn to the internet for their news, they’re reading articles produced by professional reporters and editors at organizations like ours. But they’re reading the articles elsewhere, cutting us out of the revenue from the reporting we produce.
That must change. Not just for the sake of the Bay Area News Group’s survival but for the survival of news-reporting operations across the state and the nation, including everything from local community publications to major metropolitan dailies.
Without local news coverage, there’s less oversight of local governments, a less-informed electorate and more opportunity for public corruption. Local newspapers are critical to keeping readers informed about what’s going on in their communities and holding the powerful accountable. They’re a critical part of the survival of our democracy.
Ideally, the news organizations and the tech giants would strike a deal to share the profits. But the online giants, by their disproportionate size, hold the power in negotiations with individual news organizations. And the news organizations are forbidden by antitrust laws from banding together and bargaining as a block. A bipartisan attempt last year in Congress to pass legislation to ease those antitrust restrictions failed.
Wicks is trying a simpler approach: Require the Facebooks and Googles to share the advertising dollars generated from the articles they produce. And require that 70% of those shared profits that go back to news organizations be invested in journalism jobs, ensuring that newsrooms large and small, and the communities they serve, will benefit.
It’s a simple and reasonable path forward. Perhaps one that could serve as a model for saving local news publications across the nation. Encourage your state legislators to support it.
Written by the Bay Area News Group editorial board.
