The New York Times et al wish Joe Biden would go gentle into that good night. I wish mass media would instead. Here is a post from a thread:
In this defensive New Yorker reaction to Joe Biden (finally) criticizing the press that has been criticizing him, Jay Caspian Kang shares an important insight about the falling power of the press. But I come to a different conclusion.
Kang says that media are weakened and that’s what makes it easy for Trump and now Biden alike to attack them. I say what it shows instead is that as media realize they have lost the ability to set the agenda, their response is to shout louder and more often. That is what we see every day in The New York Times.
In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I chronicle — nay, celebrate — the death of mass media and the insult of the idea of the mass. Kang makes me see that I next need to examine mass media’s behavior in their death throes. They are not accustomed to being talked back to, by their subjects or by the public. They respond with resentment. They dig in.
Journalists have never been good at listening. That is why Carrie Brown and I started a program in Engagement Journalism at CUNY (now moving to Montclair State): to teach journalists to listen. In all the wagon-circling by The Times’ Kahn and Sulzberger, The Post’s Lewis, The New Yorker’s Remnick, CNN’s Zaslav, we see a failure from the top to listen to and learn from criticism.
Kang likens Trump/right-wing and Biden/liberal press criticism but they could not be more different. Trump et al want to destroy the institutions of journalism, education, and government itself. Biden and liberals wish to improve the press. We are begging for a better Times. But The Times can’t hear that over the sound of wagons circling.
As I also write in Gutenberg, we find ourselves in a paradoxical time when the insurrectionists formerly known as “conservatives” try to destroy the institutions they once wished to conserve, putting progressives in the position not of reforming but instead of protecting those institutions.
When I criticize The Times —and Kang quotes me doing so — it pains me terribly, for I have devoted my life to journalism and long held up The Times as our standard. No more. It is failing journalism & democracy. I fear the incumbents may be beyond reform & require replacement.
By the way, the incumbents of journalism know this. That is why they invest in lobbyists to pass legislation in New York, California, Washington (State and next DC), Canada, and Australia to benefit themselves at the expense of the media — community, nonprofit, startup, digital — that would replace them. More on that another day.
So I am glad that Biden is finally criticizing The Times and its mass-media peers, if not yet by name. I am glad he rejects the fair-weather platformed pundits, moneyed executives (corporations), and elites (Clooney) who reject him now. In trying to dismiss him, they only make him more progressive.
The New Yorker headline over Kang’s column calls Biden’s criticism of the press “cynical.” It is anything but. It is an overdue and proper response to the cynical exercise of — as Kang makes me understand — the dying power of The Times et al. No one elected Sulzberger, Kahn, Lewis, Zaslav — or Remnick — to run the nation. Millions of us voted for Biden to do so.
Some on the socials insist that The Times etc. want Trump to win. I’ve said that is a simplistic conspiracy theory. I’ve thought they want chaos: something for them to cover. Now Kang makes me think instead they want to recapture their lost agenda and influence: their power.
Kang closes: “If Biden believes he is the last chance for democracy in America, perhaps he should start acting like it.” That should be said of those in charge of America’s legacy mass media: If you think you can save democracy, then start acting like it.
Here are two attempts to redraw the binary political taxonomies of today:
In the FT, Gideon Rachman argues that after the “liberal false dawn” of Obama, “In the US and France, centrists and liberals are in full panic mode. Nationalist populism now looks like a permanent feature of Western politics, rather than a temporary aberration. The old left-right divide of the 20th century has given way to a new cleavage between liberal internationalists and populist nationalists.”
Yet he offers a balm for the nerves: “But liberals should not panic. Dismantling American or French democracy would be no simple task. The hopes of a decisive victory over nationalist populism — stirred by Macron and Obama — proved to be an illusion. But the fears of a decisive defeat for the liberal, internationalist cause are also probably exaggerated.” I’ll have whatever he’s taking.
In Die Zeit’s new political Feuillton, Thomas Piketty contends to Nils Markwardtthat the center is kaput (or kaputt if you prefer the German original) and that — at least in Europe — the only solution is to pit farther left against far right. “A return to the bipolar left-right system will take time, but it is absolutely necessary if we want to restore trust in democratic institutions and enable political change.”
Markwardt continues (with help to me from Google Translate): “In doing so, Piketty is following, whether consciously or unconsciously, a concept of politics that was recently shaped above all by the Belgian political scientist Chantal Mouffe. Her core thesis is that politics is always antagonistic, it consists of the clash of different world views and programmatic contradictions that can never be completely resolved. Wanting to resolve these contradictions in a ‘third way’ or a ‘new center’, as Tony Blair or Gerhard Schröder promised before Macron, is a mere illusion. Because in the end this only creates a feeling of post-political lack of alternatives among the majority of voters, which in turn increases the need for real alternatives — from which right-wing extremists in particular benefit.”
I’m not sure how either applies to the American two-party trap we are in. In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I assert that roles of right and left are inverted: Conservatives no longer conserve but now seek to destroy institutions as insurrectionists, putting progressives in the position not of reforming institutions but instead protecting — conserving — them.
In all of this, it is clear to all that the old labels of right and left are useless.
The too-often-unspoken truth of what is happening everywhere but especially in the US centers on racism. That is occasionally touched on in pieces such as these — as the Europeans grapple with immigration — but it must be seen as the central factor. In the American election, that means that the Democratic Party steamrolls past its Black vice president and ignores the Black voters who saved us in 2020 at its and democracy’s mortal peril.
In the US, the taxonomy needs to be seen as white “Christian” nationalist vs. Black and liberal coalition (I hope).
In Gutenberg, I suggest that “the internet’s emancipation of the individual enables under represented communities to speak, organize, and act, enabling movements — reformations, even revolutions in the name of racial, gender, economic, legal, and environmental equity and justice. The existing, white power structure — in the person of the far right — counterattacks, burning the fields so as not to share their harvest with those who follow. They undermine the institutions of journalism, science, education, free and fair elections, democracy itself, and civility.”
In the US, the taxonomy that informs is Black and white.
It is no coincidence, then, that the two dissenters from The Times’ rush to guillotine Biden are Black men — see Jamelle Bouie and Charles M. Blow — and the lone supporter of Kamala Harris as a substitute is a Black columnist, Lydia Polgreen. In his immensely practical argument, Bouie said:
I have noticed that only a handful of calls for Biden to leave are followed by “and Vice President Harris should take his place.” More often, there is a call for a contested convention. But why, exactly, should Harris step aside? Why should Harris not be considered the presumptive nominee on account of her service as vice president and her presence on the 2020 ticket? And should Harris be muscled out, how does this affect a new nominee’s relationship with key parts of the Democratic base, specifically those Black voters for whom Harris’s presence on the ticket was an affirmation of Biden’s political commitment to their communities?
Blow speaks similarly:
Yet if Biden did stand aside and Harris was passed over in favor of another candidate, there would very likely be strong protest from her legions of Democratic supporters, many of them Black women, a voting bloc that is essential to a Democratic victory.
On top of that, a free-for-all selection process would be sheer chaos. Factions would fiercely compete, egos would be bruised and convention delegates would select a candidate, effectively bypassing direct participation by Democratic voters.
All the while, a mob of white columnists, editorialists, reporters, and commentators rush past them, proposing various white substitutes for Biden, giving glancing mention to the Black vice president. This is how the Democrats will lose democracy, by not at last facing the centrality of race.
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.
Disclosure: My expenses for two trips to Sacramento — one for meeting with legislative aides and the other to testify — were paid or by the California Foundation for Commerce and Education, affiliated with the California Chamber of Commerce, which also commissioned my paper.
I’ve just started using Perplexity’s Discover news application and have to say it is impressive, compiling multiple news reports on a topic and producing a well-organized summary and explanation, giving users the opportunity to query the topic — and providing citations and links to news stories (revealing, by the way, just how repetitive they are). See this example on the Pope and AI.
Perplexity is doing to news organizations what news organizations have long done to their sources, which should make journalists reconsider their relationship with information and public need. Should.
Journalists have, predictably, started screaming bloody murder, crying that the AI company is stealing and repurposing their valuable content. (I am amused it is Forbes leading this charge given that it has long since become a joke; I confess to laughing out loud every time I encounter its paywall. But it does have some good staff reporting among contributors’ output and the story at hand about military drones is one example.)
I’ve been asking lately what happens if the web is destroyed by all of media’s clickbait and now AI’s endless copies of it. And what if the web is superseded should chat and soon AI’s agents become primary means of discovery of information? Will authoritative news sources then need to make themselves discoverable through AI — as they had to through search and social? By that I don’t mean make deals with OpenAI, et al (Springer’s, Murdoch’s, Diller’s, The Atlantic’s, and others’ money grabs are not about licensing content but instead about selling their silence in lobbying and PR). Rather, I’ve been suggesting the news industry as a whole should look at creating an API for news and negotiating terms: payment, credit, links. See, for example, Tollbit; see also Norwegian media banding together to build a native-language LLM.
All this is making me ask questions about the role of news media in the larger information ecosystem. What I’m about to discuss is basic media and communication theory, but the current row over Perplexity puts it in a new light, for it makes me see how news media have played precisely the same role with source information that Perplexity is playing with them.
News media insist on looking at this new reality from their perspective, as content creators and copyright holders. But now that the shoe is on the robot’s foot, let’s look at it the other way around, from the perspective of original sources of information, research, content, creativity, opinion, and art — and from the perspective of the public: individuals and communities that need or want access to all that. Since the birth of the newspaper in 1605 (see my Gutenberg Parenthesis), everyone who has wanted to reach the public has had to go through the gatekeepers of media. Today the gatekeepers of media have to go through the new gatekeepers of search, social, and AI. Who is adding value and who is adding friction?
If Ganz and FSG thought like news organizations do when confronted with Perplexity, they would be in their rights to complain that Rothfeld took Ganz’ ideas, reporting, and research and repurposed it for the purpose of creating her essay, while the paper profited through advertising and audience attention and subscription. They would also, as newspapers do, ignore the value of citation and links.
So The Post does to a content creator what news organizations complain Perplexity does to them. This is what news organizations have long done to authors, scientists, researchers, experts, theorists, and people who have useful experiences or ideas: extract, repurpose, and exploit. How’s it feel, guys, now that it’s being done to you?
Now, of course, Ganz wants to be discovered and not just to sell books but also to have his ideas spark larger public discourse. So it is a bargain I am sure he is more than willing to make. He and FSG have something to sell.
But what of the people who simply have information that may be relevant and valuable to others and see their ideas, research, or experience taken and used by news media (often misshapen in the process)? Once sources speak to a reporter, they lose control of what they have to say. More than that, the reporter then asserts ownership of the result. The reporter now claims it as “my content” and cries when other reporters rewrite it without credit (to the reporter; nevermind the source) and when search and social quote it (while linking to it, for the benefit of the news organization). They are complaining now when Perplexity reads, summarizes, and links to their articles. Their publishers are not only suing AI companies but also lobbying for legislation to extend copyright and diminish fair use when it comes to technology.
Note well that copyright at its birth in the 1710 Statute of Anne did not cover newspapers and magazines. In its suit against Open AI, The New York Times claims that “since our nation’s founding, strong copyright protection has empowered those who gather and report news to secure the fruits of their labor and investment.” That is simply false. The US Copyright Act of 1790 protected only books, maps, and charts. Newspapers and magazines did not fall under copyright’s purview until the Copyright Act of 1909. As I explain in The Gutenberg Parenthesis [hey, I, too, want to be discovered and sell books; discount codes are here] the Postal Office Act of 1792 enabled newspaper publishers to trade copies through the mails for free to allow them to share stories — leading to the creation of the wonderful job title of “scissors editor” — with the explicit intent of creating a national network for news and with it, a nation. As I explain here, even in the infamous hot news decision favoring the Associated Press, the Supreme Court refused to grant a property right to news.
Yet newspapers act as if news, information, ideas, and opinions are their property as content. No, they merely borrow it to exploit it for their own purposes, locking it behind their paywalls to sell subscriptions and using it to attract and sell attention to advertisers.
How dare Perplexity do unto them as they have done unto others?
Now, before you @ me, let me make clear that I well understand the need to support journalists and their reporting. I spent a good deal of my career in the industry and the academe exploring business strategies. Journalism is a public necessity.
But the real necessity is an informed and educated public. That means that authoritative, expert, useful, and relevant information needs to get to the public with as little friction as possible. Today, though, every effort is going into increasing friction: paywalls, link taxes, demands to take content down, and flooding the zone of good information with bad information: propaganda, spam, and clickbait.
Am I suggesting that news should be a public utility? No. That is an impossibility given that news should operate on the public’s behalf to check power, not to lobby for favors from it. I believe that whatever we come to think of as journalism in the future must coexist in private for-profit and not-for-profit entities alongside technology, also in private but one hopes open entities.
And what is this journalism of the future? I cannot yet say. Our envisioning of it must begin not with concern for the claims of property rights to information. It must start instead with rethinking how best to make information available to the public: not to the imagined mass (that deformed creature I decry in The Gutenberg Parenthesis) but instead to each of us as individuals and members of communities.
Perplexity Discover is a nice presentation of news, richer and more compelling and convenient (because it brings much together) than Google News or even, dare I say, a newspaper. (“Reading a newspaper,” said Benedict Anderson, “is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot.”) I haven’t used Discover long enough to come to conclusions about it. And as it is generated by AI, I have no doubt it is filled with errors and thus is unreliable and unusable as a primary source of news. None of this is intended as a recommendation to switch one’s news diet to Perplexity.
But this moment does provide the opportunity to rethink the architecture of our news and information ecosystems. The goal should not be to support legacy institutions and their ways. The goal must be to improve the means by which quality, credible information is made available to the benefit of individuals and communities in the public and to the credit of the sources of that information. Intermediaries — whether newspapers or search engines or social platforms or AI companies — must add value or get the hell out of the way.
(I asked Google Gemini, atop this post, and Meta.ai, here, to draw me a pyramid with “you, Intermediaries, and sources.” These are the results. AGI is nowhere near.)
California legislators have amended a bill written by newspaper lobbyists — and made it worse. New York has enacted a law pushed by newspapers to give tax dollars to newspapers — excluding some broadcasters and the true future of news: digital and not-for-profit newsrooms. And Canada further demonstrates what a disaster its newspaper lobbyists have caused with a law that drove news off Facebook and Instagram.
The newspaper industry in both countries is in great measure controlled by hedge funds. The only investment they make is in lobbyists to write protectionist legislation. The publishers blame technology for their own failures, seek payoffs for themselves, and threaten to expand copyright and diminish fair use to the detriment of internet freedoms.
The field of journalism is a disaster from top (The New York Times and day-by-day The Washington Post) to bottom (Gannett, Media News Group, Sinclair). I will leave that lament for another day. Now I want to look at the latest in the legislation and its perils.
California’s tax on reading
The California Journalism Preservation Act — which I dissect in detail in a paper I was commissioned to research for the state Chamber of Commerce — has been amended. It is no longer an explicit link tax.
The bill demands payments from platforms for “accessing” news content online. That is a tax on reading. That is noxious to the Constitution and to an enlightened society.
It requires platforms to negotiate — though it’s not clear with whom — or submit to arbitration, paying a fee — with no cap — to “journalism providers” (undefined) based on number of journalists (including freelancers).
The bill now exempts only one technology company from its reading tax: any platform that earns at least half its revenue from “the manufacturing and sales of company-branded devices and hardware to consumers.” Guess who. That demonstrates that Apple has even better lobbyists than the newspaper industry.
Most of my problems with the bill remain: It still supports newspapers owned by hedge funds and national broadcasting companies. It still ends up supporting many out-of-state and national companies that have someone in California. It has another constitutionally troubling clause forbidding platforms from “retaliating” against news companies with whom they do not forge agreements by no longer linking to or changing ranking or placement of their content. That is a clear violation of the Copyright Act and Supremacy Clause and of the First Amendment. Compelled speech is not free speech. (This law would be locked in the courts for years.) Further, the bill sets no standards for what qualifies as journalism (though we would not want government to define that), opening the door to supporting pink slime and propaganda. Finally, there is no accountability.
Last week, I went to Sacramento — brought there by the Chamber — and spoke with legislative aides in the offices of members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will hold a hearing on the bill on June 25. (I might testify.) I’d never done such a thing and it was a fascinating and heartening exercise in democracy. Their doors were open and they were all ready to listen. I gave them my paper and in conversation presented them with a nightmare scenario and with alternatives.
The nightmare is being endured in Canada, where passage of Bill C-18 led to Meta pulling news off Facebook and Instagram and ending all support for journalism while Google agreed to pay $73 million (US) but ended other support. (More on this below.) My fear for California is that Meta will follow through on the same vow there, banishing news, and that Google will kill its voluntary Google News Initiative (GNI), taking down a number of valued programs it supports. At the ISOJ conference in Austin a few weeks ago, I heard the editor of a major newspaper from California talk about what a good and useful funder GNI has been.
In an L.A. Times report, I was relieved to see Sen. Tom Umberg, chair of the Judiciary Committee, take these concerns to heart. “I believe that we could screw up so that we make it so expensive that the platforms don’t carry [journalism] content,” he said. “That would be catastrophic.” Indeed.
As an alternative, I suggested that the legislators look to something like New Jersey’s Civic Information Consortium — which distributes grants based on its goals and the quality of proposals, requiring accountability, instead of automatically doling out money to hedge funds’ and conglomerates’ P&Ls via newsrooms on the basis of say, number of employees. The Consortium’s fund is managed by a board appointed by top public universities and the legislature on a bipartisan basis. Such a fund could underwrite initiatives like a California version of Montclair State’s NJ News Commons, which provides support and training for local news proprietors; projects like KQED’s quality news sharing network; efforts to bring coverage to undercovered communities, addressing a long history of inequity in media; and perhaps investment in startups like Lookout Santa Cruz (winner of a Pulitzer Prize this year). Such a fund could also require accountability.
In Canada and Australia before it, legislation aimed at the platforms did not end up taking effect. Google (in both countries) and Meta (in Australia) voluntarily contributed to news and thus earned exemptions from the laws. Unfortunately, I don’t yet see such an opportunity in California. Google has made an offer involving contributions of unused R&D tax credits, a large contribution to a fund, and help raising further contributions from other tech companies, which could add up to well more than $100 million a year. I hope that legislators will look seriously at what this could accomplish. I also hope they will try to foster collaboration rather than divorce for journalists and technologists — especially now, with the advent of AI. If anyone should enable such cooperation, surely it should be California, headquarters state of the internet.
If such agreement could be reached, legislators may take credit for using their bills as forcing mechanisms to bring tech companies to the table. And what about the newspaper lobbyists? As I told folks in the capitol, the old newspapers no longer set the public agenda. Hell, the once-mightly L.A. Times has a digital market penetration under five percent in L.A. County. Media News Group’s and Gannett’s papers are so thin you could shave with them. They don’t matter anymore. Politicians no longer need fear those who buy ink by the barrel as they now buy it by the pint. In fact, if you really want to tax the people who have ruined newspapers in the state, tax the hedge funds.
New York’s retrograde law
Meanwhile in New York, the legislature at the last minute passed a bill to provide tax money for job credits for journalists in the state. It is a disaster. The law specifies paying only print — yes print — newspapers and some broadcasters. Welcome to 1986. The legislation thus explicitly excludes digital outlets and not-for-profits. According to one account, it was the governor’s office that dictated this exclusion in the last-minute rush to get the bill passed without public comment.
The bill did, to its credit, specifically exclude publicly traded companies from receiving money — which should have left out the hedge funds operating in the state. But then it drilled a loophole by granting an exception to companies that have lost a quarter of circulation or workforce in the last five years, which likely lets the hedge funds back in. For Gannett or Media News Group to get money out of this but not TheCity is shameful.
Digital outlets raised alarms but it was too late; the bill had already been rushed through the legislature and signed into law. Though there is a frantic effort to find loopholes to the loopholes, it is simply true that the law is designed to support only legacy news. It is bad law. I am told by the proprietor of one local and digital site that newspaper publishers in the state’s trade association — which still does not allow dues-paying digital members to even vote — told online folks that they should keep quiet and not rock the boat. I am disturbed to see legacy newspaper publishers holding an event at my former school promoting what they call the “NY Local Journalism Sustainability Act.” They’re trying to rename the law after its birth. The bill was named the NY Newspapers and Broadcast Media Act. The name says it all.
This is what happens when politicians fear publishers and when publishers engage in conflict of interest by seeking favors from those we cover — and when they both shut down comment from the people who are doing the real work of rebuilding local journalism, and from the communities they serve. There is just no excuse for implementing something so shortsighted and retrograde — and in the media capital of the world, of all places.
Canada’s aftermath
Legislative aides in Sacramento told me that newspaper lobbyists and publishers have tried to convince them that Canada was a win for news. That’s simply wrong. As I report in my paper (which, by the way, also has a lot of fun history about copyright, media consolidation, and anticompetitive behavior past), news sites in Canada believe they are worse off, losing Meta’s traffic and the opportunity to find new audience, losing Meta’s financial support for journalism, losing Google’s voluntary grants for journalism, and gaining a bit of Google cash. As Jeff Elgie, head of the very successful local news enterprise Village Media told me: “We will probably get a bit more money than we did before with Facebook and Google combined, but we lost the Facebook traffic. So if you ask me, any day I would say, keep your damn money and give us the Facebook traffic back.”
The deal in Canada called or Google to choose an independent body to decide how to divvy up the money it is now forced to grant. Google just announced the organization that will decide among the roughly 1,400 news outlets that have applied for their silver. Given the large number of recipients, the amount any one outlet will receive is unlikely to be life-changing. I note among applicants a fashion magazine, a B-to-B site, many radio stations (I doubt all of them are cornerstones of journalism), and many, many outlets from one company declared bankrupt by the investors that own the Toronto Star and from the hedge fund that controls the largest chain in the nation, Post Media.
What now?
As I sat down with a policy aide in Sacramento —yes, in the lobby — I said, “I’m a Biden Democrat, but for the next 30 seconds I will sound like a libertarian. I am troubled by any government intervention in speech and especially journalism. But since the discussion has already gone over that wall to subsidize news, I just want to consider how to do it well.”
Supporting news should mean not supporting the hedge funds that are killing newspapers and news. It should mean making judgments about quality, equity, serving underserved communities, and accountability to communities. It should support diversity, innovation, new business models, better listening, and independence. It should support collaboration over retribution against technology companies that did not ruin news — and in any fair exchange, recognize the value of platforms’ links to publishers. If you’re going to pass laws to support journalism, then don’t support news as it was, support news as it could be.
