The California Journalism Preservation Act is our best bet to protect journalism | Opinion
The California Journalism Awards, announced on May 25, highlighted the best reporting across the state, the brightest stars of the Fourth Estate. Thomas Peele’s work on the challenges that the state’s 37,000 adjunct community college professors face every day across the state took home first-place honors in In-Depth Reporting for EdSource, a nonprofit news organization in California. Black Voice News was honored for reporter Breanna Reeves’ reporting on Black maternal health and the work being done to address the issue. The San Francisco Chronicle took home the top prize for Public Service Journalism for Joaquin Palomino and Trisha Thadani’s reporting on the disastrous state of the shelter system for underhoused Californians.
Opinion
Over at The Los Angeles Blade, where I serve as founder and publisher, reporter Karen Ocamb won Journalist of the Year in 2021 in the prestigious Los Angeles Press Club’s Southern California Journalism Awards for her reporting on COVID-19 and the LGBTQ+ community, particularly for her in-depth reporting that data wasn’t being collected at robust enough rates to support the marginalized community through a deadly pandemic. Her reporting helped lead to better data collection and support in the California Legislature and better outcomes and more visibility for LGBTQ+ Californians.
Los Angeles Blade was recently honored by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre at the New York City GLAAD Media Awards; she presented the newspaper with GLAAD’s Excellence In LGBTQ Media Award, their highest community media honor.
Excellent reporting like this is the backbone of a thriving society, unbowed by corporate interests, committed to integrity and uncovering truths, even painful ones. To fight for our critical role to serve people in California in beyond, we’re proud to support the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), AB 886, by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks. Here’s why.
High-quality journalism has been under threat for years in California, and the circumstances are now existential. During the pandemic, an average of two newspapers closed every week across the country. That has led to journalism jobs lost, corruption unreported, and vacuums where harmful disinformation proliferates unchecked.
“Studies have shown that communities without local journalism suffer consequences ranging from declining civic engagement and lower voter turnout to higher taxes and increased public corruption,” Wicks said in her statement introducing the CJPA.
As news publishers, our job is to commit ourselves to deep and important reporting and to get it into the world. As an industry, in good faith, we’ve watched and adapted as consumption trends have shifted to online platforms, becoming more focused on digital distribution and on social media platforms. But the tech companies have outpaced us in their efforts to make and keep the biggest share of the pie possible, and the situation is no longer tenable.
As we all know, Big Tech, represented primarily by Meta and Google, has changed the way people consume news. Sixty-five percent of users who get news from Google never leave the site, and 95% of Facebook users never click over to the original publishers. This diverts revenue away from publishers in three critical ways: First, Big Tech’s strategy to monetize its platforms relies on our content to spark conversations that produce engagement levels that are then sold to the highest-level advertisers. Second, the data collected on users engaged in those conversations is immensely valuable information that is resold and directed, attracting very high-level advertising dollars and depriving the news publishers of the ability to monetize their own content. Third, if users click on the original sources themselves, Google and Facebook take up to 70% of the revenue of all digital ads online. Put plainly, Big Tech is bleeding publishers dry without contributing any resources to creating high-quality content. This is not a theoretical problem. News deserts are a reality across California at a time when misinformation is at an all-time high, causing Americans’ trust in democracy and our institutions to erode at alarming rates.
Like individual employees who want better working conditions or individual doctors who can’t bargain with insurers on pricing, small publishers don’t have the leverage or resources to take on giants like Google and Facebook. We will not allow our pillar to waste away without a fight. We’re in full support of the CJPA, which will require that publishers return at least 70% of the proceeds received back to newsrooms to create jobs and sustain the critical work we do. The CJPA would also create a neutral arbiter to determine which organizations qualify and to allow full transparency to ensure that publishers are indeed returning funds to newsrooms and to job creation. Furthermore, the act would apply to publishers of all sizes, with particular emphasis on small outlets that serve underrepresented populations, such as the Los Angeles Blade, which serves content and resources on LGBTQ+ issues in Southern California with reach around the country, and, indeed, around the world.
We are determined to do our job, which is to report out the truth and educate Californians on the goings-on in the world around them. The CJPA is expected to go to a vote in the coming days. The California Journalism Preservation Act is our best bet to protect journalism, and we ask for the support of California’s legislators to make it into law.
Troy Masters is the Founder and Publisher of Los Angeles Blade (weekly in print and online at LosAngelesBlade.com, socials @losangelesblade) and Gay City News, NYC’s only LGBTQ media (weekly in print and online at GayCityNews.com, socials @gaycitynews). Los Angeles Blade and Washington Blade in Washington, D.C are partner newspapers and are the nation’s only LGBTQ media outlet members of the White House Press Corps.
