Google is the death ray for journalists

Earlier this month, the LA Times' California Columnist Anita Chabria wrote a column (excerpted below) detailing the broken news media market and explaining how the California Journalism Preservation Act could save the independent press.

Every day, what’s left of the once-mighty ranks of reporters across this country tap out stories meant to inform, entertain and expose.

Sometimes they are the work of minutes, the first bits of knowledge on breaking news such as fires, storms or even elections. Sometimes they are investigations that have taken years.

Inevitably, as soon as we publish, rich dudes with algorithms come in and sweep this work away for their own profit, like deodorant off a Target shelf. Every. Single. Story.

Retail theft is causing a civic meltdown and inspiring a ballot measure to incarcerate repeat toothpaste thieves.

But billionaire tech bros dismantling democracy for profit, stealing thousands of times a minute by selling advertising against something they don’t own? That barely gets a shrug, even as more media professionals are laid off, more publications close, and reliable information becomes so scarce and hard to spot that truth itself has become political.

“It’s sad on many levels,” state Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove) told me when I asked him what he thought of recent layoffs in media — including the loss of more than 100 of my colleagues at this paper, and cuts at other publications including the Wall Street Journal, Time, Condé Nast and the Messenger.

In all, nearly 600 news jobs were cut in January.

“It’s also sad on a democracy level,” Umberg said.

Umberg and state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) are attempting to do what other countries have already done — stop the steal — with a bill that has unsurprisingly sparked more than $1 million in lobbying by Big Tech to kill it. That spending was uncovered by Queenie Wong, a reporter at this paper who was sadly part of the layoffs, and it forced Wicks and Umberg to shelve the measure last year.

“To me, it’s a basic fairness thing,” Wicks told me of the notion of internet platforms paying part of their profits to news publishers. “I think it is going to be hard for them to say they can’t do it here when they are doing it in other places.”

She is referring to Australia and Canada, which have had enough of Big Tech simultaneously raking in advertising dollars off news content while claiming that only a few people are actually looking for news on their platforms.

“The lesson that you can take from the Canadian law is that [internet platforms] will pay,” Haaris Mateen told me. “And so the people of California are perfectly entitled to ask for payments to be made to journalism companies.”

Mateen is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Houston who has studied the issue. In November, he and his colleagues published a paper estimating that internet platforms would owe U.S. publishers between $11.9 billion and $13.9 billion a year if Congress passed the Journalism Preservation Act.

Using the same methodology, he estimates Google would owe California news publishers $1.4 billion annually, and Facebook would owe $265 million a year. In 2023, Facebook’s revenue was $135 billion, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, had $307 billion in revenue. So we are not talking about bankrupting these companies.

“I want Google to be economically successful. I want them to be one of the richest companies in the world,” Wicks said. “I also want them to do the right thing.”

Internet companies have long argued that news has little value to them, or their users, and therefore there’s nothing to pay for. One former internet executive recently claimed it was a “silly complaint” to protest the use of news without compensation because posting stories brings traffic to news sites and “Everybody wants traffic!”

Traffic is great. But traffic without revenue is worthless. And the idea that people aren’t looking for news online seems highly suspect (but the data is proprietary to the internet companies).

Those Google searches for “Ukraine?” Are they really people looking for red borscht recipes, not updates on the war?

Searches for “LA storm?” Are users really not looking for information on current weather dangers, all from news outlets such as NBC, The Associated Press, and yes, the Los Angeles Times?

“Can you imagine a version of Google with no news in it?” Mateen wonders. “It would look like Amazon.”

To read column in its entirety, click here. To learn why AB 886 is critical to preserving local news and protecting democracy, click here.

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