California Assembly votes to pass the Journalism Preservation Act
sacbee.com
sacbee.com
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
From my reading of the preamble:
1) A 'digital journalism provider' (DJP, e.g. a newspaper) submits a notice to the platform (e.g meta) each month
2) The platform must then remit to the provider some fraction of all its advertising revenue.
3) The platform is forbidden from 'retaliating' (???) again the DJP by (for example) not linking to it in the future
That third part cant possibly be constitutional.
The Californian legislative mindset appears to be based on passing bold and far reaching laws and then letting the courts determine constitutionality. They don't seem to have reservations about their own authority.
"This holocaust denial was brought to you by the California Legislature that prohibits social media platforms from deciding to ban this content".
Solved.
Your comment doesn't "solve" anything. Did you reply to the right comment?
It was an extension of your statement applied back onto the law, not a rebuttle against your claim that content would no longer be moderated-able.
We need to fire state legislators that promote plainly unconstitutional laws, it's both professionally incompetent and a violation of their oath of office ( https://www.documents.dgs.ca.gov/dgs/fmc/pdf/std688.pdf ).
But hey, if they're going to advance unconstitutional laws it's at least polite that they're so incompetently drafted that they're self mooting.
Did you mean majority rule or did you actually mean one-party rule?
Because California is a one-party rule state, and the mindset you're talking about seems to better fit for the situation where the politicians are unreasonably secure in their jobs/power.
Bipartisanship is pretty much dead everywhere. Majority rule is one party rule, even for very slim majorities. Nobody crosses the aisle anymore.
When we have a bicameral party split, or executive split with legislature, as we currently see federally on both counts, very little gets done.
It is possibly true that the unreasonably secure don’t make up more than 50% of the votes, I’m not sure.
There are leftist and centrists, and some good bills die because the centrists + GOP have enough votes to kill them.
If the trigger was displaying content from the news source's articles, that would be one thing. But just linking to a news source? That's a bit too far.
3273.63. (a) (1) "For each month, a covered platform shall track and record ... the total number of the covered platform’s internet websites that link to ..."
"..., display, or present that eligible digital journalism provider’s news articles, works of journalism, or other content, or portions thereof, and that the covered platform has displayed or presented to California residents."
The key here being the final piece, which is part of it. That the platform links to and displays the eligible work (news articles, works of journalism, or other content, or portions thereof).
The "and" is attaching a caveat that the (link|headline|content) has been shown to someone from California; it's restricting the scope of the law to California.
In other words, they type of content is collected using "or", and the scope restriction is the "and".
Something similar happened over here in Europe (I believe it was in Germany?) where news media were allowed to demand payment from Google for being listed in their news sections/search results.
Google obviously decided to stop listing them, because there are plenty of news media that don't demand payment. As a result, the flow of visitors collapsed and the news media was very happy to go back to the way things were before.
I think forcing companies to pay for something and then taking away any control they have over that entire market sets a bad precedent. I don't know a better solution, but if this sticks we'll see other ways in which companies can be drained for money from basic internet services as well, only getting worse over time.
I imagine stock photo hosts demanding payment for memes posted on social media are waiting next in line. Imagine having to pay these platforms for your users' memes without being allowed to filter out the offending material. Stock photo companies could even start to artifically hype meme formats to get a bigger cut!
I'm skimming legislature.ca.gov, I can't seem to find the definition of "covered platform", but speaking charitably, I'm guessing they basically narrowly defined a social media recommendation algorithm and are trying to regulate what it can do. Saying an algorithm can't penalize on X criteria doesn't seem like compelled speech to me.
But journalistic institutions have important functions. To pick a fairly modern example look at John Carreyrou at the WSJ blowing wide open the Theranos scandal despite the fact that Rupert Murdoch had significant financial stake in the company and owns the newspaper. There is a level of investment into investigative journalism and integrity and firewalls there that you do not have at social media companies. Most of them don't care at all, and if they pretend to you get the 'Twitter Files'.
Myth Two: "Making a link to an external document makes the first document more valuable, and therefore is something that should be paid for." It is true that a document is made more valuable by links to other relevant, high-quality documents, but this doesn't mean anything is owed to the people who created those documents. If anything, they should be glad that more people are being referred to them. If someone at a meeting recommends me as a good contact, does that person expect me to pay him for making reference to me? Hardly.
Reflecting back now, it's not wonder they eventually downsized significantly and had to vacate the large building they'd been in for decades. They could have cut huge swaths of people, just focusing on journalism, and saved a ton of money.
At least try to tell us. Give examples.
> Reflecting back now, it's not wonder they eventually downsized significantly and had to vacate the large building they'd been in for decades. They could have cut huge swaths of people, just focusing on journalism, and saved a ton of money.
That kind of sounds unrealistic. Your ideal sounds like an army with only front line troops. It'll get defeated because those troops won't get fed and will quickly run out of ammunition. Support functions are important in viable organizations.
Sure, here's one. At the time (~12 years ago), Groupon was a booming business. This newspaper (and many others) decided to try and get in on the action by creating their own local versions of daily deal sites. That team just focused on the local newspaper's version of daily deal probably employed at least 20 people, including resources from the web team that had to build and maintain a deal site akin to Groupon.
All of that in sum likely had a high price tag, and like Groupon itself, eventually puttered and faded away.
Is it their fault for trying to find a way to increase revenue? I don't know. At the same time they were doing that, the newspaper itself (both print and online), was bloated with advertising, to the point where the website was almost unusable.
When you said:
> They could have cut huge swaths of people, just focusing on journalism, and saved a ton of money.
It sounds like those huge swaths of people were the ones getting the journalists paid.
When they moved to a smaller building, did they cut journalists too? I bet they did.
Honestly to me it felt like the historical newspaper model just simply stopped being as effective, and rather than face that reality, downsize, and innovate, these companies sold their souls to the devil (advertisers).
The online platforms did the same thing but found a way to be more effective.
> Honestly to me it felt like the historical newspaper model just simply stopped being as effective, and rather than face that reality, downsize, and innovate, these companies sold their souls to the devil (advertisers).
What now? Are you somehow suggesting the newspapers shouldn't have been running ads, or decided to run fewer ads, when their other revenue was likely drying up (e.g. classified ads)?
The historical newspaper model has always been to use news to get eyeballs, them make money showing ads. If that's selling "their souls to the devil (advertisers)," they were doing it from the start.
Times change, behavior changes, technology changes. I don't see how forcing the marketplace to subsidize a failing business model simply because "freedom of the press" is codified in the Constitution is a good idea.
Maybe the press needs a rethinking? Sites like Substack are showing that's the case.
Lastly, I do want to see local newsrooms survive and thrive, I'm just stating my experience in hindsight gave me a perspective where I'm not entirely sympathetic to ideas like the one core to this thread.
I think that this illustrate well the shameful impact of lobbying. Because of their mediocrity, media are dying. This is normal free market that is working well. Instead they use of their influence to steal income from other business.
And if there are no journalists asking questions, how will you know they've been selling permits to their cousin developer for cents on the dollar while jacking up your taxes?
This is literally all just a question of supply and demand. The only people who care show up, and the rest wouldn't even spend $2 on a local newspaper.
Also, you don't have to go to the meeting to know what happened there: all of these councils and committees produce minutes that are accessible from your city's website. I bet out of that city of 1 million, only 2x as many people read the minutes of the city council (which are almost always public) as go to the meeting. The production of those minutes is a public service.
Then I moved to a suburb which didn't have that newspaper and now I have no idea about anything nor are there any avenues for me to learn. And I have kids, so no, I'm not going to all those meetings.
I'm not sure that local news is something I want as a government function, though...
Furthermore, those communications platforms should be able to say "No" if journalists demand payment for incoming traffic to their articles.
they aren't. this is akin to licensing content.
And we don't need a license to link. We have never needed a license to link. You published it in public; that's my license to link. The only access restrictions have been robots.txt and restrictions the site itself imposes by technical means.
IANAL, but so far as I know, the controlling precedent is Ticketmaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster_Corp._v._Tickets.....) If you put it online, I can link to it. That's been the legally-defined rules since 2000.
So if California wants to change that, they're very probably going to lose the court case that is almost certainly going to be triggered by this bill. And then, as others have pointed out, the result will be that nobody links to the news sites, and they lose traffic instead of gaining money.
The problem with this mindset is that there is a negative correlation between investigative journalism and corruption. (e.g. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/08/25/when-the-local-ne... and https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/72689)
When local newspapers close (or stop doing real investigative journalism) political and corporate corruption increases which causes a financial drag on the region. Given that we tend to bail out failing cities with state funds and failing states with federal funds the rest of us have a vested interest in ensuring that the other regions we're bound to maintain basic levels of functional governance.
Setting aside the specifics of the strange law in the article, I would not be opposed in principle to spending $X a year propping up journalism to avoid spending $100X a year propping up corrupt cities and states.
They are complaining that people just take the titles and don't pay for articles, but articles are empty block of rephrasing the content they got from AP.
I think the trend is even having IA and co generating these contents, like for sport newspapers.
And if you notice, also a big quantity of major newspaper ( like tv channels) are bought by moguls or the richest businessmen of most countries and then they clearly avoid doing dangerous investigation about the government and powerful persons because it is bad for business.
But if you look carefully, the media that are still doing real investigative journalism and the one that are fighting corruption are not the one that are trying to racket Facebook.
At the opposite most of them are independent, and they are proud to be funded by readers. And it works. People pay when they see that they get quality work.
For example, in France, the is an online newspaper (Mediapart) that exposed most of the recent corruption cases and still they give the option for subscribers to share the articles that they want with friends for free. It works and I think that a lot of people like me are very happy to continue funding this media with our subscriptions.
A "newspaper" that stops doing journalism and just reprints AP/Reuters articles and blog posts has already died. Whether they actually go out of business or continue on as a zombie is irrelevant since they have stopped producing journalism in either case.
To reiterate my earlier comment, I am not arguing in favor of this strange California law. And I agree with you that reader-supported journalism (and other media) is the best approach, and I subscribe and donate to several organizations I feel do good work in this area.
I'm solely responding to the earlier comment that the "media are dying. This is normal free market that is working well" to point out that we should not be so sanguine about the death of media like journalism. I am skeptical that democracy and free markets can survive without it.
It is not normal in a free market for an entire industry to die. In a free market, if one competitor starts flailing, the other competitors should pick up their slack. If every player in the market is suffering the same disease, that is indicative of a deeper problem that could plausibly be solved via regulation.
Why would you "regulate" to keep it alive? (which means keep it alive with our money)
Who decides which industry should be kept alive and which should die? Let me guess, you do.
Sometimes that's better than letting "the market" decide.
IMHO, it's a mistake to think of the market as some kind of best-decision making machine that should be left to run unattended. It's a effective, but buggy program with a lot of WONTFIX bugs that need to be mitigated through other means.
Close. It's decided democratically, via elections of representatives who in turn vote on such issues. This system has it own problems, of course.
Maybe they need an ubi for marketers and lobbyists as well.
I’d buy your argument if these media outlets were being replaced by higher quality journalism, but instead is low quality, low effort, click bait/attention seeking headlines with no substance.
(I don’t really think California is going down the right path either, but the “free market” is objectively producing garbage)
If high quantity sold, the market would shift to produce it. As it stands, people are happy with consuming only the headline of an article and moving on.
There are still many high quality outlets; most have just changed to discussion based formats. Take Joe Rogan for example. He talks to a variety of people, sometimes about current events, sometimes not. Similarly, Tim Pool, Sam Seder, Stephen Crowder, The Daily Wire, Ethan Klein's show, etc. all are daily news shows that produce content in the format people want.
The market shifted. Those working for dying industries can reallocate themselves. That's how the market keeps capital allocation efficient.
At the end of the day the position of free market fundamentalists always comes down to a tautology.
This means that goods/services are regularly not produced because it is unprofitable. If for some reason local news is profitable, then anyone that wants to consume it could easily step in to produce it.
Efficiency doesn't necessarily mean good. But it does prevent or at least minimize wasteful economic activity. Anything outside that realm is a good candidate for a hobby.
That’s my point, just because it’s a product of the market, doesn’t mean it is what’s best for society.
Just because it is a market outcome doesn’t mean that it is optimal.
Edit: it is also important to note that substack still hasn’t been proven out in the market. It is being subsidized but VC money, time will tell if it is actually something that would survive in the “free market”.
They also raised the prices for the papers, and wonder why people are stopping their subscriptions.
Niche things are generally inefficient to produce, so niche reporting goes away. Goodbye local and special interest news. Regurgitated press releases and coverage of the latest Twitter drama are highly efficient to produce, so you get more of those things.
Unfortunately for California, this measure isn't very likely to help the situation. It doesn't actually address any of the incentives that are killing local and special interest reporting. Even if the law sticks, these outlets are likely to just die anyway unless something else is done.
Copyright law won't allow copyrighting a link URL.
Fair use allows publishing short bits of copyrighted material (to varying degrees under varying circumstances).
The First Amendment allows me to publish links.
The First Amendment allows me to decide what I do or do not publish.
If news agencies have a copyright case, they should make a copyright case and get royalties.
I dunno. This seems like a really lazy “solution”.
This particular strategy has been tried in various forms in various places, and it never works. Any time you see someone say the phrase "doing nothing is not an option", you know that they are making excuses for doing something that has proven, time and again, to be just as effective as doing nothing at all.
Local news is alive and well! It just moved to Facebook, NextDoor, etc.
No, you're going to far. "Doing nothing is not an option", means "don't wait for a perfect solution." "Doing nothing at all" is rarely "just as effective" as an imperfect solution, at least when it comes to the problem under discussion.
It's also worth noting there are frequently people who benefit from certain problems or who are otherwise uninterested in solving them for selfish reasons. Those people really like to push the "do nothing" option.
It's a mindset that is action-biased. Results don't matter, being seen to be doing things is what matters, apparently.
Subsidizing local news isn't a bad idea. It's doing it like that's stupid. Just tax social media use in California and use that to fund a revenue-positive subsidy.
Social media companies with more than N users in the state. Simplest: user tax. Complicated: fraction of attributed revenue or a user-hour toll.
The U.K. has legally and culturally normalised this. That’s not as easy in America, by design.
The whole topic is absurd given legislative inaction on paywall bypass tools and archive sites, which blatantly steal copyrighted content.
E.g. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sf-nonprofit-uch...
Let me ask you something. Do you keep filling a bucket with more holes with zero attempts at fixing even a single hole?
You want to save journalism? Make advertising illegal.