Every day, what remains of the once-mighty ranks of reporters across the country publish stories meant to inform, entertain and expose.
Sometimes they are the work of minutes, the first knowledge about breaking news such as fires, storms or even elections. Sometimes they are investigations that have taken years.
Inevitably, as soon as we publish, rich guys with algorithms come along and sweep this work up for their own profit, like it's deodorant on a Target shelf. Each. Single. History.
Retail theft is causing a civic crisis and inspiring a ballot measure to jail repeat toothpaste thieves.
But tech billionaires who dismantle democracy for profit steal thousands of times a minute by selling advertising on something they don't own? That's barely a shrug, even as more media professionals are laid off, more publications close, and reliable information becomes so scarce and hard to detect that truth itself has become political.
“It's sad on so many levels,” state Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove) told me when I asked him what he thought of the recent media layoffs, including the loss of more than 100 of my colleagues at this newspaper and the cuts . in other publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Time, Condé Nast and Messenger.
In total, almost 600 jobs in the journalism sector were eliminated in January.
“It's also sad on a democratic level,” Umberg said.
Umberg and state Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) are trying to do what other countries have already done (stop the theft) with a bill that, unsurprisingly, has sparked more than a million dollars in lobbying for part of the big technology companies to put an end to it. That expense was discovered by Queenie Wong, a journalist for this newspaper who was unfortunately part of the layoffs, and forced Wicks and Umberg to shelve the measure last year.
They are determined to revive it this year, but it will depend on how affordable their colleagues are. Because, of course, there will be more money invested in ending it and more pressure from big tech companies to keep this whole mess out of the public eye. That pressure will extend from the Assembly to the governor's office.
However, if California does not pass Assembly Bill 886, it means our elected leaders are cowards or money grabbers who are content to watch our democracy crumble in exchange for campaign contributions. Honestly, it's that simple and that terrible.
“To me, it's a question of basic fairness,” Wicks told me of the notion of internet platforms paying part of their profits to news publishers. “I think they'll have a hard time saying they can't do it here when they're doing it elsewhere.”
He's referring to Australia and Canada, which are already fed up with Big Tech companies simultaneously raking in advertising dollars from news content while claiming that only a few people search for news on their platforms.
Both countries have passed laws (albeit flawed and heavily watered down by the lobby) requiring Google and Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and others) to negotiate payments with news publishers.
A similar bill here in the United States, the Journalism Preservation and Competition Act of 2022, is going nowhere in the Republican-dominated Congress, where a far-right contingent that rose to power on propaganda and lies has little interest in stopping that situation. in.
Which leaves California in the lead, something the state is well positioned to do with its economic power, powerful enough to take on even the Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world.
“The lesson that can be learned from Canadian law is that [internet platforms] will pay,” Haaris Mateen told me. “And that's why the people of California have every right to demand payments be made to news companies.”
Mateen is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Houston and has studied the topic. In November, he and his colleagues published a paper estimating that internet platforms would owe American publishers between $11.9 billion and $13.9 billion a year if Congress passed the Journalism Preservation Act.
Using the same methodology, he estimates that Google would owe California news publishers $1.4 billion a year, and Facebook would owe $265 million a year. In 2023, Facebook's revenue was $135 billion and Alphabet, Google's parent company, had revenue of $307 billion. So we're not talking about bankrupting these companies.
“I want Google to be economically successful. “I want them to be one of the richest companies in the world,” Wicks said. “I also want them to do the right thing.”
Mateen and his colleagues also found that internet platforms and news publishers offer “complementary services,” meaning they help each other make more money together than they would each make separately, if the internet companies weren't simply stealing their part of the equation.
Internet companies have long argued that news has little value to them or their users and therefore there is nothing to pay for. A former Internet executive recently claimed that it was a “silly complaint” to protest the use of news without compensation because posting stories drives traffic to news sites and “Everyone wants traffic!”
Traffic is great. But traffic without revenue is worthless. And the idea that people don't search for news online seems very suspicious (but the data is owned by Internet companies).
Those Google searches for “Ukraine”? Are these really people looking for red borscht recipes and not updates about the war?
Search for “Storm in Los Angeles?” Aren't users really looking for information about current climate dangers, all from news outlets like NBC, the Associated Press and, yes, the Los Angeles Times?
“Can you imagine a version of Google without news?” Mateen wonders. “It would be like Amazon.”
But that is the main threat that Internet platforms are using to stop US or California legislation: that if those laws are passed, they will publish news from their sites. News publishers fear this, because even the paltry amount they currently earn from searches is crucial for results to skyrocket.
In protest of the Canadian law, Meta blocked access to news on its sites for Canadians this summer.
Pascale St-Onge, Canadian Heritage Minister and Member of Parliament, warned at the time that “Facebook is trying to send a message, not only to Canada, but to other countries such as New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. “
But Mateen said Canada is a much smaller market than the United States or even California, and it would be difficult for internet giants to implement that kind of ban here.
“The California government has a lot more negotiating power on this,” he said.
Mateen also warns that the window to fix the problem is closing.
The urgency to act now “is enormous” because the next era of AI is about to get worse and complicate the situation, he warns.
We are already seeing experiments with companies using artificial intelligence to write news articles. The results have not been impressive at all, but there is more to come.
Mateen said that once the technology improves, which it will quickly, the platforms will pick up the articles and feed them into artificial intelligence applications that will mash them like potatoes and spit out something they call original content.
These stories of stolen fragments will change and become intertwined enough with multiple sources that it will be impossible to trace anything back to a single original article.
No responsibility, no trust and no one to pay.
It is imperative to create a precedent now that news has real value, so that when AI absorbs everything, it will be reasonable for news companies to demand that their content be licensed or some other compensation before it is destroyed and made untraceable .
The media can't stop big tech companies alone. It has tried, with subscriptions, one-off deals like the deal between Google and the New York Times, and other desperate but futile attempts to find “new models” that will somehow cover the revenue gap without preventing internet platforms from doing whatever they want. . without consequences.
Of course, there is more than one problem plaguing the news industry. But like retail theft, the media needs a systemic solution: government intervention because the thieves are too powerful, too organized, and too brazen.
Whether that happens or not will depend on what the public demands, whether we care as much about news theft as we do about deodorant.
