Can Legislation Save Journalism in California?

One of the biggest problems facing news publications over the past decade has been the fact that digital publishers have swallowed a huge chunk of the profits. The major tech platforms—Facebook, Google, Apple—largely controlled how much traffic a news site would get, and served as gatekeepers for both readers and ad dollars. They even sometimes dictated how outlets built their newsrooms: the phrase ”pivot to video,” inspired by an edict from Facebook, is both a dark joke and a post-traumatic stress trigger for many former colleagues. And in recent years, this dynamic has only gotten worse, as the big tech companies take a larger and larger chunk of the pie by keeping viewers on their own platforms rather than sending them to the actual websites whose information they’re using.

But it’s not hopeless.

There have been some serious legislative efforts to address this problem. In 2021, Australia passed a first-of-its-kind law to force social media companies to share a portion of the profits they make from news content with news companies. (The law brought in almost $150 million in its first year.) Canada followed suit last year.

Now California lawmakers are seriously considering the California Journalism Preservation Act, a bill modeled on those countries’ laws with the aim of arresting and reversing the decline in local media. It would be the first of its kind in the US. (Similar legislation has been introduced in Congress but so far hasn’t gotten much traction.) The bill would force the big tech companies into an arbitration process with newsrooms, to establish a fee that the companies would pay to carry news articles. It passed the California State Assembly last July with broad bipartisan support. Its backers hope that after some modifications, it could become law later this year.

Unsurprisingly, the bill has run into vocal opposition from Big Tech.

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