SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — A new ad campaign from the News Media Alliance, which represents publishers, is trying to drum up support for proposed legislation that would force big tech companies to compensate news outlets for their content.
The 30-second commercial says the “big tech cartel” has monopolized access to news and forced outlets to play by their rules while driving California newspapers out of business.
“Our dominant distributor reaps the benefit and the revenue off of our content by keeping our content, repackaging it to our readers but on their platform so that they generate the revenue,” said Danielle Coffey, News Media Alliance CEO, in an interview from Washington.
The ad encourages residents to write to their state senators supporting the California Journalism Preservation Act.
The bill passed the state Assembly and is now going through the state Senate.
Meta threatens to block news
It would force companies like Meta and Google to pay news outlets for their content if passed. Publishers would be required to reinvest the money back into journalism jobs.
“I think a lot more is at stake than we realize,” said Coffey, who added two newspapers close every week in the country.
Publishers like Martha Aszkenazy of the San Fernando Valley Sun have argued tech giants have broken the market as ad dollars that used to fund newspapers have shifted to Google and Facebook.
“Small papers like mine are finding it impossible to survive,” Aszkenazy told lawmakers in a June judiciary committee in the state Senate.
The proposed law has generated opposition from the ACLU California Action and tech giants, who would see their bottom line impacted.
Google has started blocking news as a test for some users in California and has threatened to end the Google News Initiative, which the company spends millions on.
Meta said it would restrict access to news on Facebook and Instagram if the bill becomes law—something it did in Canada when similar legislation was introduced by Canadian lawmakers.
“That would be catastrophic,” said Jeff Jarvis, a former New York journalism professor, while speaking at the June judiciary committee in the state Senate.
The bill will be the subject of another state Senate hearing next Thursday in Sacramento.
