In a Friday blog, Google announced that they are beginning a short-term “test for a very small number of Californian users”, whereby Google will be removing links to California news sites. The California Journalism Preservation Act, or CJPA, was passed by the American state’s legislature in 2023.
The blogpost is a good example. Google CJPA was accused of favouring conglomerates, hedge funds and small local newsrooms at the expense.
It would be in the interest of media conglomerates, hedge funds, who have been advocating this bill, to use CJPA funds to purchase local California papers, remove journalists from them, and produce more ghost newspapers that are operated by a small crew and only provide low-cost and low-quality content. CJPA will also disadvantage small publishers and restrict consumers’ access to local media ecosystems,” Jaffer Zaidi wrote in a blog.
What is California Journalism Preservation Act?
CJPA has been introduced to the California State Legislature and approved by them in 2023. It will need to go through the California state senate and be amended by them, before being signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom. CJPA requires platforms such as Google to pay a journalism fee to digital news organizations whose content is displayed on Google’s search results or elsewhere.
Google will require that eligible Californian news organizations submit an official notice. Google will track how many links were shown to these outlets on their platform, and whether or not the work of the news outlet was visible to California residents. Google must then give the relevant news organizations a portion of their advertising revenues based on this information.
Google, among others, opposes the CJPA.
Google has stated that its opposition to CJPA will give larger news conglomerates a unfair advantage, but does not elaborate on how this will be achieved.
It’s interesting to note that this has happened in the digital world dominated by Google and Meta. The Reuters Institute has conducted studies that show how conglomerates such as the New York Times, among others, have gained more audience at the expense small local publishers.
The real reason for this is because the new law may eat away at the company’s profits and revenues. This is something unthinkable to a tech company that has stockholders who expect it to increase its revenues each year. Google opposes similar legislation in several countries.
While Google has said that they are “experimenting” by removing California-based news outlets from the Google News feed for Californians’ benefit, Meta says it will have to do so. Facebook Instagram, rather than paying into a fund which benefits mainly large media corporations from out of state under the pretense that it is helping California publishers.
Who’s right?
Google’s and other companies’ concerns are valid. There is, for example, a requirement to cap the amount the company can be forced to pay. It could depend on many things, but without one the law may put the business at risk.
There is also the possibility that some news organizations that operate primarily outside of California could pretend to be Californian outlets in order to benefit from this new law. That is not the main point.
In the last few years, Google and Meta built up digital advertising monopolies in part on the backs of the journalists who’s work people all over the world read. The news industry has seen a decline in recent years, as advertising revenue has shifted from print to digital, where there are monopolies.
The CJPA, however, could bring some of this revenue back, particularly to smaller and struggling local media outlets that in many cases are considered the spine of the Fourth Estate.