Should California’s journalists support the California Journalism Preservation Act?
Media Guild of the West President Matt Pearce sent the following memo to MGW members on March 20, 2023:
On April 4, rank-and-file Media Guild of the West members will debate whether we support large tech platforms paying California news publishers for featuring our journalism on their services.
California Asm. Buffy Wicks is introducing the California Journalism Preservation Act (AB 886), which “directs big tech companies to pay publishers a ‘journalism usage fee’ each time they use local news content and sell advertising alongside it.” The bill has been submitted to committee and is expected to be in print on March 24.
Media Guild of the West and our siblings at the Pacific Media Workers Guild, which represent unionized journalists across California, have been approached by our management counterparts at the California News Publishers Association, who are backing this legislation, to ask for labor’s position on this issue. We should decide where we stand.
Guild leaders from across our parent union, The NewsGuild-CWA, including myself, were previously critical of a similarly named but differently structured measure in Congress, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. That federal bill would have granted news publishers an antitrust exemption allowing our employers to jointly bargain for more favorable digital ad rates from Facebook and Google.
Many Guild members work for large corporate employers such as Gannett, McClatchy and Alden Global Capital, and it was the height of irony to ask unionized journalists to support expanding collective-bargaining rights for the chains that had been so hostile to collectively bargaining with their own workers. Ultimately, it was the lack of a guarantee that revenues from JCPA would actually go back toward journalism – and not more job-cutting mergers, self-indulgent stock buybacks and extravagant executive pay – that made The NewsGuild-CWA’s support a non-starter.
However, The NewsGuild-CWA did not join other critics in opposing JCPA. As that bill failed in Congress, we denounced Meta’s threat to ban our journalism from its services, a thuggish corporate pressure tactic to avoid regulation after extracting countless ad dollars from our labor over the years, little of which has been reinvested in local journalism. While journalists have the power to hold greedy news industry bosses accountable at the bargaining table and on the picket line, the Big Tech landlords who have profited handsomely from our work prefer to avoid the increasingly brutal negotiations over paying our wages. This is the definition of a free-rider problem.
The California Journalism Preservation Act takes a new approach. California publishers heard labor’s concerns regarding the federal JCPA and are supporting a proposed requirement that no less than 70% of the usage fees be directly reinvested into our newsrooms. That makes this a journalism jobs bill.
If we enter this fight, we can’t simply fight yesterday’s war over ad tech policy. Large tech companies are mobilizing to further profit from our newsrooms with AI models that will likely scrape and repackage our journalism without paying for the necessary human labor, our labor, that teaches the machines what’s new in the world. Journalists need to start having those conversations today.
Media Guild of the West members will discuss and vote on a resolution authorizing advocacy for Wicks’ bill, conditioned on the legislation supporting newsroom jobs.
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Media Guild of the West, The NewsGuild-CWA Local 39213, was founded in 2019 and represents unionized journalists and media workers at the Los Angeles Times, Southern California News Group and Desert Sun in Southern California, plus several other major newsrooms in Arizona and Texas.