Lawmakers increasingly concerned about the dwindling presence of local news outlets are renewing a push to shore up the financially ailing media industry.
An Oregon bill aims to make tech giants remit a percentage of their digital advertising profits to journalistic entities. A similar measure could also emerge in Illinois. A bill in Virginia would create local journalism sustainability tax credits. A Washington State measure would impose a tax surcharge on certain advanced computing businesses to fund grants to journalists covering underserved communities.
The efforts, mostly led by Democrats, come on the heels of an agreement in California last year that obligates Google to contribute to a public-private News Transformation Fund.
Former California Sen. Steve Glazer (D), who last year proposed taxing the tech industry to fund journalism and in 2022 established a pioneering local news fellowship program, encouraged state lawmakers to “hold [tech] platforms accountable” for the collapse of local journalism.
“[These companies have] extracted data from their citizens in their state, never paid for it — and it is that enterprise that has contributed to the hollowing out of newsrooms,” said Glazer, whom the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism described as one of the state’s “greatest champions of local news.”
State lawmakers’ growing interest in preserving the news media comes as traditional revenue models have collapsed, and as Amazon, Google and Meta have cornered the digital advertising market. More than a third of U.S. newspapers have folded since 2005, including the closure of 127 last year, according to the Medill State of Local News Report. The report also found that more than half of U.S. counties have “limited or no access to local news.”
Oregon Sen. Khanh Pham’s (D) bill would require the country’s largest tech companies to either pay into a digital journalism compensation fund or make an annual donation to a new Oregon Civic Information Consortium responsible for advancing research and innovation in media and technology.
Pham’s bill includes elements of the California Journalism Preservation Act, a 2024 bill from Assembly Appropriations Committee Chair Buffy Wicks (D) that was not passed but led to California’s deal with Google. The Oregon bill also borrows from a 2018 New Jersey law that established the nation’s first Civic Information Consortium with the goal of improving the state’s local news ecosystem.
“We are looking to rebalance the scales in the marketplace, so Oregon’s news content creators can survive and serve Oregonians with the news and information we depend on,” Pham said in a statement.
A second Oregon bill from Sen. Cedric Hayden (R) would allow an income tax credit for people who buy news subscriptions.
Oregon has lost more than a third of its newspapers and nearly 70% of Oregon cities do not have a local source of news, according to the nonprofit FORJournalism.
The financial crisis in the news business has also caught the attention of Illinois Sen. Steve Stadelman (D), a former longtime local TV news anchor. Last year, he introduced legislation similar to the California Journalism Preservation Act to require companies such as Google and Meta to pay a journalism usage fee. The bill failed, as did a proposal to require the state to direct 50% of its advertising dollars to local media.
Illinois lawmakers did approve a requirement for a 120-day notice before a local news organization is sold. They also established a Local Journalism Sustainability Tax Incentive Program to encourage news organizations to hire and retain reporters.
New York has a similar program in place. Washington State, which established a news fellows program modeled on California’s, enacted a law in 2023 to eliminate the business and occupation tax for newspaper publishers.
Stadelman told Pluribus News he is considering refiling a version of the Journalism Preservation Act for 2025.
“I do continue to believe there needs to be some kind of compensation for local news from big tech companies,” Stadelman said.
Stadelman said he is “open” to private settlements with large tech companies as happened in California. Under that agreement, Google, which earned $238 billion in advertising revenue in 2023, committed to pay $55 million over five years into a News Transformation Fund and other journalism programs.
California also agreed to contribute $30 million in the first year followed by $10 million a year for the next four years. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) included the $30 million in his recent budget proposal, but the News Transformation Fund was recently dealt a setback when the U.C. Berkeley backed out of hosting it.
Wicks, who played a key role in brokering the deal with Google, praised it at the time as a “cross-sector commitment to supporting a free and vibrant press” and said it was “just the beginning.”
Critics panned the agreement, noting that Google had previously agreed to pay news organizations in Canada $70 million (in U.S. dollars) annually in exchange for being exempted from a law that requires tech companies to compensate news publishers. California and Canada’s populations are similar in size.
“California’s journalism deal with Google was a first-in-the-nation type of agreement and it should be a last-in-the-nation type of agreement,” said Matt Pearce, president of the Media Guild of the West, which represents unionized journalists.
Pearce recently sent Newsom and legislative leaders a letter suggesting six ways to improve the agreement with Google, including by incentivizing other tech giants to contribute to the fund in lieu of public financing.
Glazer called the deal “completely inadequate.” He said his proposal to tax tech giants, which the Senate passed with a two-thirds vote, would have generated about $500 million a year for California newsrooms.
“We believe it was enough to not just stabilize but to grow newsrooms back to their previous size,” Glazer said.
The deal with Google effectively squelched both Glazer and Wicks’s bills. Later reporting by CalMatters showed Google spent nearly $10 million opposing the measures.
If the Oregon bill gets traction this year, it is likely to face fierce tech industry pushback. Prior to the California agreement, Google had started blocking access to some news. Meta had threatened that if Wicks’s bill was passed it would stop allowing news on Facebook and Instagram for California residents, as it did when Canada enacted its Online News Act.
Google and Meta did not offer comments for this story. Chamber of Progress, a self-described center-left tech industry coalition whose corporate partners include both companies, panned news usage fees as “link taxes.”
“Any state that’s taken a close look at this idea has rejected it,” Chamber of Progress spokesperson Allie Caccamo said. “Link taxes won’t save struggling local papers, but they will bring a windfall for national right-wing media by incentivizing clickbait.”