A deal brokered by California Assemblymember Buffy Wicks with Governor Gavin Newsom and tech companies to provide state newsrooms $250 million over the next five years sparked a rebuke from a journalists’ labor union.
The deal was announced on Wednesday in a statement from Wicks’ office. As part of the “first in the nation” deal, $100 million is expected to be provided to California newsrooms in the first year of the program. A “National AI Accelerator” to help journalists use and experiment with artificial intelligence will also be established.
According to KQED, Google will contribute $15 million each year to grants for the program.
Newsom praised the deal as a “major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California” in the statement.
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“The deal not only provides funding to support hundreds of new journalists but helps rebuild a robust and dynamic California press corps for years to come, reinforcing the vital role of journalism in our democracy,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Wicks said the deal “represents a cross-sector commitment to supporting a free and vibrant press, empowering local news outlets up and down the state to continue in their essential work.” While the Newsom administration agreed to the deal, Wicks’ office led negotiations.
However, the program sparked criticism from the Media Guild of the West, which represents unions such as the Los Angeles Times Guild, Southern California News Group, the Long Beach Media Guild and other publication unions.
In a statement released Wednesday, the guild described the deal as “undemocratic and secretive,” warning that “not a single organization representing journalists” agreed to the deal.
“After two years of advocacy for strong antimonopoly action to start turning around the decline of local newsrooms, we are left almost without words,” the statement reads.
It continues, “The publishers who claim to represent our industry are celebrating an opaque deal involving taxpayer funds, a vague AI accelerator project that could very well destroy journalism jobs, and minimal financial commitments from Google to return the wealth this monopoly has stolen from our newsrooms.”
Newsweek reached out to Newsom’s office via email and Wicks’ office via contact form for comment.
Meanwhile, Danielle Coffey, the president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, another publishing union, wrote in a statement that the deal “reinforces the need for federal legislation and potential court remedies to address this broken marketplace.”
However, California News Publishers Association CEO Chuck Champion and Board Chair Julie Makinen were more supportive of the deal. They described it in a statement as a “first step toward what we hope will become a comprehensive program to sustain local news in the long term, and we will push to see it grow in future years.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that the deal will take place of legislation previously pushed by Wicks that would have required Google to compensate news outlets when using their content. The agreement will provide funds to newsrooms across the state, which has seen many news outlets close amid industry challenges, as well as the University of California Berkeley.