For those of us who enjoy watching Dodger games (go Blue!) on SportsNet LA, each season brings with it, along with the living highlight film that is Mookie Betts, a batch of annoying commercials apparently bought in bulk by one oddball outfit — along with the normal ads for fast food and whatnot.
Usually, it’s for some variation on the Maglite, which can be frozen inside a block of ice and still work, still blind intruders with its strobe, or an emergency roadside kit necessary for every motorist’s trunk.
This season, the bulk buy, running over and over (and over), was created not by some entrepreneur using the aesthetic sensibility of a 1967 weird-product catalog but by one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world: Google.
Its message, if you happen to be a journalist: We are very much enjoying eating your lunch, and would like to continue to be able to do so, and could you put some of this relish on the hot dog, so we can enjoy eating your lunch even more?
There was no variety to the ad — it was the same one, on repeat. It told viewers that something called the California Journalism Protection Act was aimed at interfering with their right to “search” for the news online, and that if they enjoyed being able to do so, for free, they ought to contact their lawmakers in Sacramento and urge them to “find a better solution.”
In a nutshell, the CJPA, which this newspaper’s editorial board backed, as we would like to stay in business, would have required Google and its pale competitors to pay us for taking our content rather than simply stealing it like a crook with a gat at your local Stop ‘n’ Rob.
The act, AB 886, was authored by Assemblywoman Buff Wicks of Oakland, and, along with the allied SB 1327 from state Sen. Steven Glazer, seemed to have been making headway in the Legislature, despite the laser focus of opposition by my-lunch-eating Big Tech.
Well, I’m not quite sure what happened — perhaps many of you contacted your representatives, as suggested by the Palo Alto billionaires — but on Wednesday Wicks announced that she was dropping her bill after negotiating in private with Google. Instead of paying newspapers like ours directly for the use of our stories and pictures, the deal, according to Steven Waldman of Rebuild Local News, will “apparently provide $45 million ($15 million from Google; $30 million from the government) in new funding in the first year for local newsrooms, and some support still to be determined in out years.”
Glazer, who was left out of the closed-door dealmaking, seems furious: the agreement “seriously undercuts our work toward a long-term solution to rescue independent journalism,” he told reporters. His office wrote in a statement: “Despite the good intentions of the parties involved, this proposal does not provide sufficient resources to bring independent news gathering in California out of its death spiral.”
Death spirals, not good.
There hasn’t been a lot of time to analyze the deal, ‘cause no one outside the room really knows all the details. But it’s already clear it contains a creepy part: a Google-funded “AI Accelerator.” Perhaps Silicon Valley will just order ChatGPT to create the news, and that’s what you’ll get when you “search,” and the pesky press can just slink away faster than we already are.
Wicks’ office says some new “public-private partnership” will give $250 million over five years to support local newsrooms in California. That’s less than Google’s $65 million one-year agreement to support Canadian newsrooms — and our economy is bigger than Canada’s.
Details to come. But something stinks here: the secrecy.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
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