LOS ANGELES — Standing across from the old, empty Los Angeles Times building, former reporter Matt Pearce is hoping the remaining façade is not just a memorial to a dying industry.
“Someone has to do journalism,” Pearce said. “Someone has to chase the mayor down the hall asking the hard questions."
In addition to being president of the Media Guild of the West, Pearce was one of roughly 100 journalists who lost their jobs at the Times earlier this year amid budget cuts.
Freshly unemployed, Pearce went to Sacramento to work with Assemblymember Buffy Wicks on a bill to force major platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay for news. In June, Wicks’ bill requiring companies such as Google and Meta to share advertising revenue cleared the Assembly floor with bipartisan support. The bill required 70% of the revenue shared with news outlets to go to journalists’ salaries.
Wicks boasted the bill — named the California Journalism Preservation Act — would save journalism.
Less than two months later, that bill is dead.
Pearce and his Guild are slamming the resulting compromise.
“I spent the last six months fighting for some structural change only to watch it end very spectacularly badly,” Pearce said.
Last week, Wicks announced the results of closed-door negotiations: a deal to provide $250 million in private and taxpayer funds to print and digital newsrooms over the next five years. Gov. Gavin Newsom said the public-private partnership will lead to hundreds of new journalism jobs. Wicks declined an interview request from Spectrum News.
About $40 million of the money will go to an “AI Accelerator” to assist businesses and the government to utilize artificial intelligence, according to those close to negotiations.
The handshake agreement between California and Google effectively kills the state’s effort to regulate big tech amid massive layoffs in the news industry.
“This partnership represents a cross-sector commitment to supporting a free and vibrant press, empowering local news outlets up and down the state to continue in their essential work,” Wicks said in a statement. “This is just the beginning.”
The deal is supported by the California News Publishers Association, which represents more than 700 news organizations.
Journalism professor and author Jeff Jarvis recommended this sort of compromise in a paper commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce. A board at UC Berkeley will decide which outlets qualify for the funding.
“My hope is that what will be benefited here is not the old publishers and the hedge funds and their bottom lines but instead Black, Latino, LGBTQ and start-ups because that is the future of news. Not old media,” Jarvis said.
In a statement to Spectrum News, Google’s parent company Alphabet called it a “collaborative framework to accelerate AI innovation and support local and national businesses and non-profits.”
Google ran ads against the proposed regulations earlier this year, threatening to remove news from its platform rather than pay for it.
This week, both the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Asian American Journalists Association joined the chorus of journalists denouncing the compromise.
“It’s a swindle and I think it’s untenable,” Pearce said of the agreement. To him, without structural change, he said, the outlook for the news industry remains bleak.