As California works to finalize a settlement with Google that could allocate about $250 million toward local journalism, legislators in other states are considering whether to follow California's lead or to continue to pursue revenue-sharing bills on their own.
As announced by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks in late August, California’s deal would allocate about $250 million over five years from the state and Google toward journalism across California. Google would provide about $110 million, and the state would kick in $70 million to support journalism jobs, with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism administering the funds. Google also would spend $70 million to fund the National AI Accelerator, intended to equip researchers and businesses with tools to tackle the future of artificial intelligence.
“This agreement represents a major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said at the time.
But what does it represent for newsrooms in other states?
“Many folks are logically asking: Does that mean this is the model now for the U.S.?” said Anna Brugmann, policy director for the nonprofit public-policy advocate Rebuild Local News. Many questions surround what the Google deal means in California and beyond, Brugmann said, with Illinois and New York also having crafted legislation calling on big tech companies to boost local journalism.
“I have no sense of how it’s going to impact my bill or any path forward here in Illinois, but it certainly was an interesting development,” Illinois State Sen. Steve Stadelman said of the pending California deal with Google. Stadelman, a Democrat, chaired the bipartisan Illinois Local Journalism Task Force that introduced measures, passed by the Illinois legislature in late May, to provide $25 million in tax credits over the next five years to local news organizations to hire and retain journalists.
The Illinois task force also crafted the Journalism Preservation Act to require Big Tech companies such as Google and Meta to compensate news organizations for the content that they share, display or link to on their platforms. But the Illinois legislature took no action on that bill this spring, with Stadelman saying he was waiting to see what precedents might be set in California before Illinois moved forward with similar measures.
Months later, Stadelman still is looking toward how the Google-California deal shakes out. “If there’s an agreement reached, it kind of sets the bar for potential actions in other states, so you certainly are aware and do pay attention, and it does have an impact on what you try to do in your own state,” Stadelman said.
New York Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who sponsored a bill that will provide $90 million to New York local journalism through a tax credit passed in April of this year, said he also is monitoring the California-Google deal.
“California is taking a different approach, which I am following closely,” Hoylman-Sigal said. “It is encouraging that California was able to come to a deal with Google to help support their local media outlets, and I particularly applaud them for including nonprofit news outlets and digital-only outlets in their approach.”
At the same time, Hoylman-Sigal said he remains focused on expanding the local journalism tax credit in place in New York.
“Our approach codifies the support for local journalism into our state law and is not subject to the whims of a for-profit company,” he said.
Because the Google-California agreement has yet to be finalized, the precedents being set remain in question. “This is a handshake deal at this point, and so hopefully Google will live up to its side of the bargain,” Brugmann said.But the deal also has drawn criticism from those who argue that Google is underpaying. Anya Schiffrin, co-author of “Paying For News: What Google And Meta Owe U.S. Publishers,” said Google’s proposed total payout of $110 million to California news organizations is less than 8% of the estimated advertising dollars Google should owe.
“Google, in the U.S., owes publishers $10 billion a year,” Schiffrin said on NPR’s “Weekend Sunday Edition” podcast. “In California, they should have been paying $1.4 billion a year.”
Rebuild Local News President Steven Waldman also has voiced concerns about the numbers being discussed. “The subsidy is not nearly enough to address the massive scale of the problem facing local newsrooms in California,” he wrote in a commentary published on the Rebuild Local News website. “The number of journalists has declined by 68% in the last two decades, or by about 5,000 in California. To get even back to that level, we’ll need $375 million per year between earned revenue, philanthropy and the government, or about $125 million from the government.”
Waldman noted that although final details have not been released, the Google-California plan apparently would “provide $45 million in the first year or between $7,000 and $10,000 per editorial employee for each newsroom.”
Still, Waldman found plenty to embrace in the pending deal, which he called “a step forward and a down payment on a strategy to revive local news in California. Along with similar steps taken recently in New York and Illinois, there is now a real movement underway to help save local news through public policy.”
Waldman appreciated that this proposal maintains editorial independence for local news outlets and will prevent Google from blocking local news content from users’ search results, as it has previously done in California and Australia while revenue-sharing models were being debated. Also, funds to newsrooms would be calculated based on the number of editorial employees at each outlet rather than web traffic, ensuring that smaller news organizations, rather than solely large corporations, would benefit.
Stadelman said he hopes to see such a formula replicated in Illinois. “I think that’s a unique way to try to make sure that the dollars are distributed evenly,” the state senator said. “I appreciate that goal.”
Brugmann also was encouraged by some potential yardsticks being set by the California deal. “We do have a precedent of a job-based subsidy for local journalism,” she said. “That’s an important legislative precedent to have on the books. We also have a precedent of tech supporting local journalism. Both of those are really good precedents that can be built on in California.”
Stadelman said he appreciates the incremental progress being made in California. “In the legislative process, sometimes you have to find a middle ground and reach a compromise that allows you at least to move things forward and improve the situation,” he said. “I think that’s certainly what the advocates were trying to do in California.”
While Stadelman and other state legislators await the deal’s final details, Brugmann encouraged other states to adapt this agreement to their respective budgets and journalistic needs.
“Yes, we continue to listen to California local journalism stakeholders,” she said. “But jurisdictions feel empowered to meet this crisis in the way that best meets the needs of their local journalism stakeholders.”
Hannah Carroll served as an intern on the bipartisan Illinois Local Journalism Task Force's final report, which Sen. Stadelman used in drafting Illinois’ legislation.
Article image by Arthur Osipyan used under Unsplash license (Unsplash)
