‘Google got off easy’: Why media experts oppose California’s new journalism bill

Journalists and media experts say the new California legislation will primarily benefit Google in that it will allow them to bypass fees.

Google will soon give California millions of dollars to help pay for local journalism jobs in a first-in-the-nation deal, but journalists and other media industry experts are calling it a disappointing agreement that mostly benefits the tech giant.

The agreement, which was hashed out behind closed doors and announced this week, will direct tens of millions of public and private dollars to keep local news organizations afloat. Critics say it’s a textbook political maneuver by tech giants to avoid a fee under what could have been groundbreaking legislation. California lawmakers agreed to kill a bill requiring tech to support news outlets they profit from in exchange for Google’s financial commitment.

By shelving the bill, the state effectively gave up on an avenue that could have required Google and social media platforms to make ongoing payments to publishers for linking news content, said Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania. California also left behind a much bigger amount of funding that could have been secured under the legislation, he said.

“Google got off easy,” Pickard said.

Google said the deal will help both journalism and the artificial intelligence sector in California.

“This public-private partnership builds on our long history of working with journalism and the local news ecosystem in our home state, while developing a national center of excellence on AI policy,” Kent Walker, president of global affairs and chief legal officer for Google’s parent company Alphabet, said in a statement.

State governments across the U.S. have been working to help boost struggling news organizations. The U.S. newspaper industry has been in a long decline, with traditional business models collapsing and advertising revenues drying up in the digital era.

As news organizations move from primarily print to mostly digital, they have increasingly relied on Google and Facebook to distribute its content. While publishers saw their advertising revenues nosedive significantly in the last few decades, Google’s search engine has become the hub of a digital advertisement empire that generates more than $200 billion annually.

The Los Angeles Times was losing up to $40 million a year, the newspaper’s owner said in justifying a layoff of more than 100 people earlier this year.

More than 2,500 newspapers have closed since 2005, and about 200 counties across the U.S. do not have any local news outlets, according to a report from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

California and New Mexico are funding local news fellowship programs. New York this year became the first state to offer a tax credit program for news outlets to hire and retain journalists. Illinois is considering a bill similar to the one that died in California.

Here’s a closer look into the deal California made with Google this week: