How To Save The News
from the not-in-a-way-that-funds-hedge-funds dept
There is still hope that California’s perilous, protectionist legislation for news could be reformed, but not without effort.
I just returned from Sacramento, where I was invited to testify (video below) in opposition to an Assembly bill by Buffy Wicks, which I analyzed in depth in this paper and later criticized as amended. It has passed the Assembly and the Senate Judiciary Committee. A competing bill by Sen. Steve Glazer, which I also criticized, just passed the Senate.
So now there are two bills in play for a long, hot summer of negotiation in Sacramento — not versus each other but versus a counterproposal from Google, which I’ll describe below. The good news is that Wicks made clear in her testimony before mine that her bill — though well along in the process — is a work in progress, and she is open to change. She and Glazer appeared together in the hearing to show unity of purpose.
I continue to have problems with both bills. The Assembly bill is a tax on “accessing” content — thus a tax on reading. The Senate bill is a tax on gathering data — thus a tax on information. They each would benefit the hedge funds that are destroying the 18 of the top 25 newspapers in the state that they control. If anyone should be held responsible for the death of newspapers and taxed for it, it should be the hedge funds. Instead, the bills blame Google and Meta for news’ decline and hold them singularly responsible for its fate. The Assembly bill requires an unwieldly process of arbitration. They are each constitutionally questionable and could spend years in courts before a penny is paid.
A negotiated agreement would be preferable. Google has proposed an alternative involving unused tax credits and a $30 million contribution to a fund for journalism. In my testimony, I say that I favor a fund, like the Civic Information Consortium in New Jersey. Rather than distributing money indiscriminately to hedge funds and out-of-state media conglomerates as both bills would, an independently administered fund could grant money based on goals and merit, with accountability. Rather than feeding corporate bottom lines with no assurance of supporting journalism, a fund could support specific efforts such as KQED’s quality news- and ad-sharing network; it could foster the creation of support networks like the NJ News Commons at Montclair State; it could invest in news startups such as Lookout Santa Cruz, which just won a Pulitzer; it could most importantly support coverage for underserved communities.
The negotiation should not — cannot — be just with Google, for it is ridiculous to hold a single company responsible for the fate of another entire (generally mismanaged) industry. Who else might join in such a fund is a crucial question. Before I testified, I reached out to Meta, which still insists that if a bill passes it will pull news off its platforms as it did in Canada, where — despite spin from publishers’ lobbyists — the situation is now dire. Meta is also ending the deals it was forced to make under Rupert Murdoch’s legislative gunpoint in Australia, threatening to ban news there. That would be catastrophic in California, for I fear it would give Meta an excuse to take down news across the U.S. Passage of one of these bills requiring payment would also lead to the death of voluntary contributions made through the Google News Initiative, which has done much good.
I hope that Meta can be convinced (pressured by its home-state politicians) to contribute to a fund and bring news back to Facebook and Instagram just when democracy needs it most. I’d also like to see Amazon and Microsoft contribute.
It shouldn’t just be tech companies taking responsibility for the health of the news and information ecosystem. It’d be great if Press Forward, the journalism megafund, would partner in a California fund, along with any of the state’s many billionaires. State and local governments could contribute as well, devoting large shares of their advertising budgets to quality local news media.
On the other side of the table, negotiations must not be monopolized by legacy newspaper companies and their lobbyists. The hedge funds’ papers are zombies. The L.A. Times has a market penetration in L.A. County under five percent, but I hear that its billionaire owner thinks he’s owed an absurd payoff from Silicon Valley. They hardly matter anymore. As I told one legislator, you need no longer be intimidated by the people who bought ink by the barrel for they now buy it by the pint. Any discussion must include Black newspapers, Latino news organizations, not-for-profit news media, independent news organizations, and digital startups, all of whom should step up to be heard.
At the end of my testimony, I urged the legislators to foster collaboration between news and technology, rather than divorce. California of all jurisdictions — as the headquarters state of the internet — should set an example for journalism and technology working together, especially as AI looms on the horizon (and so does fascism).
Google and other tech companies can help in other ways. I’d like to see them develop statewide and regional ad networks for news and specifically for Black media, Latino media, and so on. They could collaborate on development of appropriate uses of AI in news (not to manufacture clickbait). Google and Meta have supported training for journalists in product and audience development (full disclosure: at my former school); I’d like to see that continue and grow.
How much better it would be to encourage such collaboration instead of extracting a pound of digital flesh from tech companies to reward the lobbying of hedge funds and investors.
Who knows what will come out the other end of the legislative sausage extruder, for there are many other cards to be played, including what I think is terrible legislation trying to regulate AI from the wrong end and privacy.
For more details on the Assembly bill, see an excellent and fair analysis of from the counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee here.
And here is what I had to say in my three minutes in Sacramento.
Filed Under: california, information tax, journalism, link tax
Comments on “How To Save The News”
Can we save "the news"?
I admire your advocacy, but I’m not convinced we can save “the news,” mainly because there seems to be substantial disagreement about what news is. As you point out, hedge funds own a significant share of what used to be called newspapers. Most of those newspapers no longer carry much local news. We’ve lost investigative reporting, and the hedge funds won’t waste their money on that. I prefer a fund that supports independent journalists, although I don’t know how to correctly identify them. Or a fund that supports independent local papers (which include digital newspapers).
Incidentally, I suspect that the hedge funds are no longer getting much ROI from their newspaper acquisitions. They’ve cut all the staff, and the revenue must be shrinking because no one bothers to read these rags. About all that keeps them afloat are the weekly advertising inserts and some sports coverage. The history of hedge funds suggests they’ll soon dump these properties, leaving someone else to pick up the pieces.
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I was thinking the same thing. The title says “news”, but much of the text talks about journalism more generally. They’re often conflated, but are not the same thing.
“News” is only the stuff that’s happened recently. We don’t necessarily need hundreds of reporters and thousands of bots reporting the result, with no analysis, of a court case that was concluded a few minutes ago. People like to see that, just as they like to gossip, but I doubt it would be any big loss to society if people stopped refreshing pages every minute.
Investigative reporting, which you mention, is mostly not news; it takes long enough that whatever’s being reported on is no longer recent (although, occasionally, the public revelation of whatever they found is kind of news-like). I think it is more beneficial to the public.
I disagree with Jeff that reporters should be propping up pseudoscientific ideas such as race. By continuing to write as if humanity is actually made up of various “races”, they’re perpetuating the problems that go along with that.
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Jeff said that, huh?
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No, he didn’t. AC is being disingenuous with that argument. What Jeff actually said was:
Basically, it’s AC who’s being racist by wanting news orgs run by non-white people to go basically ignored, since the assumption by the majority of people (both white and from ethnic minority groups) is that they are run by white people. IOW, AC is turning a genuine argument used in critical race theory on its head by using it in a racist way.
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The history of hedge funds suggests they’ll soon dump these properties, leaving someone else to pick up the pieces.
That’s where the fascists roll in, if they think they can get something from the corpse of a former news organization (the name) that adds a semblance of legitimacy to their thousands of crank and LLM-produced propaganda outlets.
Re: Can we redefine 'news'?
Absolutely agree with you. Much of the problem in this deliberation is that legacy publishers would wish us — and legislators — to make “news” synonymous with them and their dying products. In New York and Washington State, print publishers’ lobbyists managed to get legislation passed to give them tax breaks, specifically excluding competitors, including digital and not-for-profit news outlets.
As for my wording of the headline, I was making a too-sly reference to an earlier post of mine about this legislation headlined, “This is no way to save the news.” https://medium.com/whither-news/this-is-no-way-to-save-the-news-698ea9e5abf9
So basically, the assembly bill is a scrape tax
What gathers and read data when it comes to trying to tax? An automated system. And what does this? Social media snippets and search engines. How do they do it? They scrape data.
I would like to save the news but they won’t save themselves. I’m looking at you, The New York Times. All the news that’s shit, you print.
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There’s plenty more news in the USA then just the New York Times, you know.
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Sure, which news organizations do you think are worth saving?
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Jeff Jarvis is losing it over California’s move to save journalism by taxing tech giants like Google and Meta. He’d rather kiss their billionaire backsides than save local news. His talk about collaboration is a joke—he’s groveling to the digital overlords crushing small newsrooms. Jarvis’s Chicken Little act about tech companies fleeing if taxed is peak trolling, putting corporate wallets above real journalism. He’s not saving anything; he’s just trolling for his tech overlords.
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Lol, nice try.
Re: Oh, my
Well, oh, my. I guess you haven’t seen the news from Canada.
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To be fair, that’s a lot harder these days for people who aren’t inclined to go seek it out themselves.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
Wouldn’t this fall under First Amendment concerns? The biggest issue with any sort of state run fund is that picking particular outlets would be that it’s picking and choosing.
The reason alternatives end up giving a bunch to hedge funds is because they don’t discriminate (and those hedge funds happen to own a bunch of media), dodging that problem. It’s a double edged sword.
I’m not sure how you would get both.
And secondly:
The issue seems largely around the size of the fund (and the threat of yanking it). I would be a bit worried that they see this as just a nuisance fine to make the problem go away.
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How so? Besides, public funding of news has been occuring in California for 75 years, so I highly doubt it is an issue with this proposal.
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Wouldn’t picking “good” (whatever criteria for “good” you want to use) news organizations involve sort of process that would be considered not content neutral? So it’d end up favoring certain types of speech, for First Amendment purposes.
Maybe I’m wrong, I am legitimately asking, I’m really unsure how it works.
Ahh, I didn’t know that. I’d be curious to know how it picks what to fund.
I’m doing a bit of googling now in response to your post, and it seems like funding might be different when it comes to 1A: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/government-funding-and-free-speech/ . So maybe I’m completely off base and it’s a nonissue.
Re: Re: Re: Agree
Yes, I share your First Amendment concerns. I am not comfortable with government interference, positive or negative, in speech and especially journalism. But the discussion is past that as bills are flying, so I want to try to examine better alternatives.
You’re also right about the focus on the fund. In my paper about the antecedent legislation in other countries, I examine just that: This is about legislative bribery and so, yes, it does come down to the number of dollars.
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Thanks for the reply! I’ll be sure to check out the full paper
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Yeah it’s a non issue. The government gives trillions of dollars a years to companies on a grant basis in virtually every industry, effectively picking winners and losers. And a considerable portion of the money goes to advocacy either directly or indirectly. They key here is that the metrics are published and rational, the application process is competitive, and selection is transparent. They are an epic pain in the ass to administer on both sides.
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Yeah I just assumed it was different for e.g. a defense/contracting companies, vs expressive companies like newspaper or whatever. But I guess I’d just never seen it
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Ah yes, here we go again. Time for Arianity to tell us not to trust Facebook while everyone else is already saying they don’t.
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And now it’s time for them to reply to your comment with a strawmanning lie about it.
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Two things: PBS and NPR.
Time to lie about what happened (after it’s been explained to you) about a completely un related topic instead of actually addressing the point, you mean?
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Every accusation a confession. We can go back to the relevant articles to see exactly what you sad, remember?
It is absolutely critical that if dollars are coming out of this in the end, that it be distributed fairly instead of being hoovered up by the hedge fund owned Big Publishing corporations.
Big Publishing pulled this stunt in Australia where the countries link tax became a Rupert Murdoch slush fund – and Newscorp slashed jobs everywhere anyway because there was no point in maintaining that pretense once the check cleared.
In Canada, Big Publishing is attempting to pull the same stunt in my country as well. Google agreed to the $100 million fund model and picked an organization made up of independent news organizations to fairly distribute the money. Big Publishing went completely ballistic and screamed bloody murder and shouted “conflict of interest” that the organization they have over 90% control over won’t be able to block out independent organizations completely and someone other than themselves might get a tiny fraction of that funding. Their whining made it clear for the 16 billionth time that they had zero intention of benefiting any smaller entities despite them talking a big game at various senate hearings about how Canada’s link tax law was about bringing in the smaller players. It was part of the many ridiculous lies they came up with in an effort to sell the legislation. Since that bills passage, each lie Big Publishing passed off as fact came crashing down to the ground one by one.
It’s good to see people on top of that in California. Don’t buy into whatever hype Big Publishing is selling, they want to hoard any and all money they can get out of all of this to themselves and block out any smaller players from even touching it.
Also, Meta is pulling news if the link tax is passed in California. They’re already ending deals in Australia and Canada has been devoid of news links on their platforms since last August (so, nearly a year). If Meta doesn’t drop news links in California, that would be a massive surprise, but I wouldn’t even bother counting on that. Just expect it will happen to save yourself the needless guesswork. Meta has not been harmed by dropping news links in Canada and they got first hand knowledge how little people bother with links on their platforms. Users simply don’t miss it. Everything about their experience in Canada has taught them that it’s perfectly fine to just drop news links. Users will continue sharing memes and the only people who suffer are the news outlets and those who have an interest in news (the latter of which is of little concern to Meta in the grand scheme of things. They are a very tiny minority of their user base).
I get hoping that news links won’t be dropped given the massive amounts of harm that would cause including layoffs and bankruptcies – both of which happened in Canada. Unfortunately, sympathizing with the media outlets that would get absolutely wrecked from that move won’t be enough. If anything, those outlets should be preparing for a post Meta world where they target other platforms for their audience (even Google would be reasonable to gamble on). Just know that the move was purely driven by the California link tax law, not Meta. Meta is just making a reasonable business decision here (and yes, it still makes my skin crawl that I’m agreeing with Meta on anything).
I’m observing what happens in California with great interest. What’s more, Californians can at least take comfort in knowing that another jurisdiction was dumb enough to try link taxes before them (Canada) and learn a lot from the outcomes. A heck of a lot of guesswork was taken out of the equation whereas in Canada, it was all uncharted territory when this insane law was working its way through our legislative process.
But its working in Australia!/s
“Meta is also ending the deals it was forced to make under Rupert Murdoch’s legislative gunpoint in Australia, threatening to ban news there. ”
I love this. A slap back to all those that claimed that “its ok, works fine in Oz should work here”. Baloney
it all comes down to consumer demand
The old paradigm for news – and especially for physical newspapers – is dying off. Technology changes things. People in general don’t seem to think “news” is worth paying for, except for old folks watching cable TV news, and they’re headed for the boneyard fast.
People have replaced the old kind of news with their own individual solutions. I don’t read the LA Times or subscribe to it, even online. Instead I have my own group of sites I hit up for real, non-corporate news, and this site is one of them. Would the LA Times ever publish an article like this? It would go against their corporate masters’ agenda.
Some people I know just access Democracy Now or YouTube channels full of vaccine baloney and chemtrails but they can do them.
Here we go again
Canada wasn’t the first to try this, neither was Australia, a bunch of European countries have had a go at this.
In every case, Facebook and/or Google got themselves exempted when the gov’t realized their political theatrics ruined a good thing!
In Canada Google got exempted early on (and even slipped in some Malicious Compliance) and Facebook recently got their exemption from the bureaucrats.
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[citation needed]
Facebook dropped news links on August 1st of last year. They became compliant with the Online News Act as a result. Nothing, to my knowledge, has changed on that front since. News is still blocked on Facebook, so I’m not sure what you are referring to here.