‘We have to fight.’ Why a union leader is going to battle against Meta and Google | Opinion

As a union leader representing journalists, Matt Pearce is on the front lines of America’s newspaper wars. Countless times he has met with his opposition, the for-profit newspaper chains that have dominated the industry, many bought by hedge funds, that Pearce negotiates with for better wages and working conditions.

In recent months, Pearce has begun shifting attention to adversaries that are never across from him at a bargaining table, the titans of the internet like Google and Facebook. They post the work of journalists he represents on their sites while paying little to nothing for the content.

Opinion

“Our work has helped make Mark Zuckerberg,” the founder of Facebook, “wealthier than God,” said Pearce, the president of the Media Guild of the West. Now Pearce has Zuckerberg squarely in the union’s crosshairs. The guild is supporting a California Assembly bill that would force large social media companies to share a portion of their advertising revenues with California news outlets large and small. It is labor’s emerging support for Assembly Bill 886, the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), that may prove the decisive factor.

Authored by Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, AB 886 places California on the cutting edge of a global issue yet again. This time it is the regulation of the internet.

When people read the work of journalists, they often find stories far from the original source, in social media posts or through a search engine like Google. The advertising dollar follows the reader who found the story and goes to these second-hand repositories of news instead of the original source of the journalism and the journalists. This is the existential threat to journalism today.

Countries such as Canada and Australia have already passed measures designed to force social media publishers to share advertising revenues with news sites. In Australia, the News Media Bargaining Code took effect in March of 2021 and after a brief suspension of news sites on Facebook has resulted in more than 30 compensation deals between news outlets and social media companies, according to Reuters. Google had also threatened the Australian government that Australians could lose access to its search engines.

In Canada, the Online News Act was just passed into law amid controversy. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced it would restrict Canadian news content on its platforms, according to the BBC. And Google said it would block news sites. In response, the governments of Canada and Quebec have announced that they will pull their advertising dollars from Facebook and Instagram. The Toronto Globe and Mail reported that governments are not yet pulling advertising dollars from Google because the company is said to be negotiating with Canada.

In California, AB 886 would mandate that social media companies such as Meta and Google pay a “journalism usage fee” to news outlets. The fee will come from advertising revenues that are going straight to social media companies instead of the news outlets that created the content. Newsrooms will be required to spend at least 70% of the money on news journalists and support staff.

This was Pearce’s demand to ensure his support for AB 886, which is co-sponsored by the California News Publishers Association (CNPA), California Broadcasters Association and News/Media Alliance

Wicks and the publishers agreed. “The amendments they have supported make this by far the most transparent version of this legislation anywhere,” Pearce said.

The core regulatory mechanism in AB 886 is arbitration.

Social media giants would have to pay for journalism

Both sides would share in the costs of a three-member panel from the American Arbitration Association. This panel would decide what percentage of the journalism-based revenues should be shared with the providers. The cycle would repeat itself at least every three years.

AB 886 passed through the California Assembly last month and now awaits consideration in the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 11.

“We are losing an industry that is part of our Constitution,” Wicks said. “That is what my colleagues (in the Legislature) are responding to.” (AB 886 is supported by The Sacramento Bee’s parent company, McClatchy, which also publishes The Fresno Bee, The Modesto Bee, San Luis Obispo Tribune and Merced Sun-Star.)

Google and Facebook are opposed to the legislation. So are the nonprofit news outlet CalMatters, the American Civil Liberties Union and the California Chamber of Commerce, among others. Reasons vary. According to Politico, tech lobbyists have been filling the inboxes of Sacramento legislators with assertions that AB 886 will “line the pockets of hedge fund vultures and corporate conglomerates.” Others contend that AB 886 puts the internet on a slippery slope of profit sharing.

If this was just a contest between the big publishers and the big social media companies, AB 886 would be another industry-on-industry fight. But Pearce and his union have changed the playing field.

Hired by the Los Angeles Times during its bankruptcy in 2012, the 38-year-old Pearce started as a national reporter covering everything from mass shootings to the 2020 presidential campaign. He was part of the newsroom’s movement to unionize in 2017. As president of the Media Guild of the West since 2020, he represents more than 1,000 journalists in Southern California, Texas and Arizona.

“We have to think more systemically as a union,” Pearce said. Last year, he began to wade into waters that journalist unions typically avoid — politics. He began tracking federal legislation to bolster publishers in their pursuit of social media profits. Pearce didn’t like what he was seeing. “There was no requirement that the money stay in the journalism business,” he said.

That effort failed.

California Labor is supportive

Then CNPA approached him with the idea of proposing a similar measure in the California Legislature this year. Pearce demanded that AB 886 require 70% of any shared revenue from social media go straight into newsroom budgets. Then he took it to his rank and file for support in April. And finally, it was time for the little union to call the mother ship.

Pearce messaged Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation, a Sacramento powerhouse with 1,200 affiliated unions. He asked if they had any interest in supporting AB 886. The response came quickly:

“Hell yes.”

The federation sent a “Floor Alert” to the Assembly. Big Labor was suddenly in and watching.

Shortly before the Assembly vote, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, issued a threat. Should AB 886 become law, Meta would pull posts containing California journalism from its flagship social media outlets, Facebook and Instagram.

The tactic did not work.

“That was bulls--t,” Gonzalez Fletcher said in an interview. “Just California? How would that work?’

The Assembly passed AB 886 decisively, 55 to 6.

Unlike measures in Congress and in other countries, “this is the only legislation that ensures that a majority of the money goes back to the newsroom,” Gonzalez Fletcher said. “That is the selling point.”

Because the bill has no fiscal implications for the state budget (it is entirely self-funded by industry), AB 886 is likely to face only three more potential votes — in the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 11, then the full Senate and then concurrence back in the Assembly.

Negotiations continue.

“The feedback and input of California’s news guilds continue to strengthen the bill at every step of this process,” Wicks said.

Can AB 886 pass? “Possibly,” Gonzalez Fletcher said. “The big question is the governor. I have never spoken to the governor about this bill. I am not sure how he lands.”

Personally, this issue is both real and fascinating. Having returned to journalism after 16 years away in government, I now understand how columns like this will be coded in a newsroom’s publishing system with a search headline that you likely will not see. The internal headlines and keywords are designed to get flagged by Google so that if you happen to search for information about this issue, you will find my column.

Pearce, meanwhile, is preparing for another trip to a Capitol hearing room. On his previous visit to town this spring, he looked around the room and concluded he was the only journalist present. He is trying to reshape an entire industry. And the situation is urgent.

When it comes to American journalism, “our house is on fire,” he said. “Something is wrong. If we don’t act now and act out of our comfort zone, we are going to die. We have to fight.”