California has an issue. It’s not homelessness, a scarcity of housing or the state’s increasing unaffordability, all of which have been documented at size.
It’s reality decay.
If you happen to imagine that info is the taproot of data and increasing private vistas is essential to studying, there’s a case to be made that the nice Golden State — quietly, with scant discover — is rising extra impoverished by the day.
Within the final quarter of a century, a 3rd of California newsrooms have closed.
Practically 7 in 10 journalists have misplaced their jobs.
The relentlessly merciless economics of the information enterprise, pushed in good half by the voracious profiteering of monoliths reminiscent of Google and Fb, has devastated the trade — together with the newsroom that employs your pleasant columnist — drastically shrinking its output and leaving California, like the remainder of the nation, vastly worse off.
There’s an info vacuum and that house is filling up with rubbish.
More and more, the each day eating regimen of “information” that the media serves up is being sourced from partisans, propagandists and self-interested promoters who falsely model themselves as prophets of the unvarnished reality.
(If you happen to genuinely can’t differentiate between news and commentary, reminiscent of this, or between these making an trustworthy try to current a good, all-things-considered account of occasions versus somebody shaving, eliding and shoehorning info to suit a predetermined narrative, right here’s a suggestion: Save time, skip the remainder of this column and switch to the sports or comics pages.)
Not way back, California took a child step towards addressing this rampant decay.
Now, even that tiny effort is tottering.
In August 2024, the state and Google reached a deal to speculate $175 million over 5 years in native journalism. It was a compromise of types, and a lopsided one at that. Lawmakers have been pushing a measure, just like these enacted in Australia and Canada, that may have pressured tech giants to pay on-line publishers for the ransacking, er, use, of their journalistic content material.
They will nicely afford it.
In only one 12 months — 2018 — Google made $4.7 billion from the work of reports retailers, in keeping with the Information Media Alliance, a commerce group. The corporate’s share of its settlement with California — $55 million — is barely a speck on its steadiness sheet; income for Alphabet, Google’s mum or dad firm, topped $102 billion in its most up-to-date quarterly earnings report.
Google spent $11 million lobbying to kill the journalism-support legislation, however ultimately agreed to kick in no less than one thing. Fb took an oppositional stance — greed and amorality apparently being endemic to its company tradition — and threatened to take away information posts from its social media platforms if California pressured the corporate to cough up for the information it used.
Gov. Gavin Newsom hailed the deal with Google, modest although it was, with attribute grandiosity.
“This settlement represents a significant breakthrough in making certain the survival of newsrooms and bolstering native journalism throughout California,” he stated. “The deal not solely offers funding to help lots of of recent journalists however helps rebuild a sturdy and dynamic California press corps for years to return, reinforcing the very important position of journalism in our democracy.”
The fact, nevertheless, has turned out fairly in another way.
In Might 2025, Newsom slashed the state’s first-year commitment to the newsroom-subsidy program from $30 million to $10 million, citing funds constraints. (In the identical funds 12 months, California vastly expanded its film and TV tax credit, displaying the place the governor’s priorities lay.) Google then stated it will match the state’s $10 million funding and no extra.
However even that $20 million has but to succeed in newsrooms. And going ahead, the prospects for enhancing California’s stretched-thin newsrooms look exceedingly dim.
In his most up-to-date funds proposal, launched this month, Newsom proposed precisely zero dollars for the so-called Newsroom Transformation Fund. Which implies Google is on the hook for exactly zero {dollars} — although any contribution in any respect is topic to the corporate’s goodwill.
“The deal was by no means etched in paper and signed by any celebration — it was a handshake settlement in precept,” Erin Ivie, a spokesperson for Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, instructed CalMatters. (The Oakland Democrat was a key participant in negotiations with Google.)
“There was by no means any penalty or consequence constructed into the settlement,” Ivie stated, “because the association is voluntary, not coercive.”
Steve Glazer, a former Democratic state senator from Orinda, authored legislation that would have imposed an “extraction” fee on the key tech platforms, elevating about $500 million a 12 months that California information retailers might have used to rent native journalists. It handed the Senate in June 2024 on a two-thirds vote however was torpedoed as a part of the compromise that resulted within the cope with Google.
Glazer, who left the Legislature in December 2024, has continued his combat to maintain native journalism, serving as a senior adviser to the group Rebuild Native Information, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that seeks to do what its title suggests.
“A functioning democracy has unbiased information as (a basis) for oversight and accountability,” Glazer stated, noting the erasure of two-thirds {of professional} journalists in California within the final 25 years. “The flexibility of the general public to get info, discern the info and have reasoned opinions about who’s in cost and doing what’s in severe jeopardy and not using a strong native information neighborhood.”
Forcing social media platforms to pay for the information and knowledge they pilfer and monetize appears a fairly modest and cheap step. Not simply to offer information publishers the equal of a good and trustworthy wage, but additionally to bolster our wobbling democracy by fostering an engaged and educated voters.
It’s not an excessive amount of to ask of lawmakers: Make California robustly knowledgeable once more.
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