Google and Meta Are A Threat to Journalism

Paris Marx: Matt, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Matt Pearce: It's good to be here — and tech, indeed, won't save us \[laughs\]. PM: A lot of people can relate to the title of the show, I think. I've been familiar with your work for a while, since you were at the LA Times, and now, of course, as president of Media Guild of the West. I was interested in talking to you because there was this discussion in California around bringing forward these bills that were going to get the tech companies to provide some funding to journalism, to publishers, not dissimilar to what we've seen in Canada and Australia. To start, could you talk to us a bit about what those bills were, and what the California legislature was proposing for what this was going to look like? MP: California initially started out with one bill that was modeled pretty closely off of similar legislation that passed in Australia and Canada. And the basic concept of this legislation... some people call it bargaining code legislation. Other people call it a link tax legislation. Basically, it is collective bargaining for news publishers against Meta and Google. Those are the huge advertising monopolies that both distribute a lot of journalism and profit from journalism through the digital advertising networks that power those platforms. So, the basic concept of this legislation is that, if we're going to be stuck with these gigantic monopolies that are going to have control over how our journalism is not just distributed, but profited from, there should be some kind of mechanism to return some of those monopoly profits to the newsrooms that are making the journalism. We got interested in this legislation because there were rumblings that it was going to emerge in California as well, which would be the first state-level attempt at this kind of legislation, that's part of a much larger global fight between news publishers and Google and Meta. And also it's important because California, as the nation's largest and wealthiest state, often sets the framework for the rest of the nation for how governments are going to regulate large companies. The other thing that really interested us about this framework is that we could see that not only there were these really bad declines in traditional newsrooms like newspapers — which obviously they're going off a cliff, people aren't reading the print edition anymore, stuff's moving online — but you can also see in recent years the collapse of a lot of digital media that was supposed to be the future. So stuff like BuzzFeed News, stuff like Vice News, these really creative digital news outlets that were filled with a lot of talented people trying new stuff, doing journalism in a different way. In recent years, you've watched those news outlets implode spectacularly as well. And there were a lot of reasons for that. Venture capital was involved, and there were some overly high expectations in a lot of those places — specifically The Messenger, which was the Jimmy Finkelstein place that imploded pretty badly recently. But one thing that they had in common — the one thing that newspapers have in common, the one thing that public media have in common, the one thing that digital media have in common — is that all of them are struggling to find a way to even just exist digitally. For me, it's an ecosystem problem that touches on all forms of content production. I'm not even somebody who uses the word "content" because I'm a journalist. I make journalism. Journalists make journalism. But it's something that we have in common with musicians and Hollywood creatives, which is that more and more of our work is getting shoved onto platforms that we don't even negotiate with, we don't have bargaining power with, which are certainly getting extremely wealthy off of the stuff that we're producing for mass audiences. This legislation was a first bite at the apple at the state level in the US, and we got involved in that fight. So along for pushing for that legislation in California — and that was called the California Journalism Preservation Act, Assembly Bill 886, sponsored by assembly member Buffy Wicks — there was a separate riff on this idea that emerged over the legislative session. It was a data mining tax sponsored by Senator Steve Glazer, and both of these sponsors are Democrats. And the data mining tax argued something slightly different, which is that these platform companies — Google, Meta, and Amazon; which is becoming an increasingly large force in digital advertising — there's a barter that happens when you're going on their services. When you're using Instagram, you're trading away your private information to Mark Zuckerberg, so that he can, in a more sophisticated way, sell t-shirts to you. So, that barter, you can tax as an exchange. And if you hook it up to Meta's advertising profits, you can tax that and use that to fund basically anything, the way that you would if you were a government taxing anything and putting money into the general fund. And so Glazer's idea was that we'll tax the data mining of these companies, this exchange that happens between consumers and these platforms. And he compared it to mining. Basically, when you have coal mining or gold mining or something like that, there's all these negative environmental effects that it has. So he proposed it as a mitigation — that data mining has all these negative social effects, that the platforms that it powers have these negative social effects — and we're going to use this tax to try to offset some of those negative social effects. In this case, he tied it to a journalist employment tax credit, and also some funding for the education system in California. And so that bill proposed taxing Google and Meta and Amazon to a billion dollars a year, with about half of that — $500 million — set aside for journalist employment tax credits, the idea being that, on a macro level, You would subsidize employment for journalists. So there's no reason just like handing money to companies if they're not producing journalism in the name of journalism. So that was the concept. So obviously for us, we're a union of journalists. Both of these things made sense to us. And so we signed up to support both bills, and either one, if they had passed, would have been the single most ambitious piece of local journalism support to pass in the US since the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And this is not a country that, relative to other democracies around the world, has public investment in journalism on nearly the same scale as places like the UK, Canada — with the CBC and the BBC — other Nordic countries, Europe... this would be one way of doing it, directing it through the platforms and putting the platforms on the hook for funding journalism. PM: It's really interesting to hear you describe that because on the one hand, like up here in Canada, which is where I am, we're like: Public journalism is not funded nearly as much as like the UK, or Norway, or somewhere like that. But I guess looking from the United States, it's still a lot more than what is provided on a per-capita basis. MP: It's so fascinating to me because I have friends in Canadian media and they're really like frustrated with the Canadian media environment. And I'm looking up there and I'm just like: Oh my God, we don't have anything that's like the CBC. So California and Canada have similar populations, but the CBC, I think the news guild CWA represents something like 4,000 journalists and media workers in Canada for the CBC alone. And I'm like: Imagine if California had a public option for news that employed 4,000 journalists and media workers running around every corner of the state. You could practically double the amount of news production that's happening in California if we had what Canada has, a country with the same population, but like half the GDP. And Canada's trying all sorts of other stuff. Like they've tried this bargaining code legislation, there's some media subsidies too. It's really funny because Canadian media also suffers from a lot of the same problems of corporate consolidation and corporate predation, but at the same time, you see a much more active government trying to create ambitious media policy. And at the same time, it's not nearly as ambitious as what countries in Europe are trying to accomplish. So, it's really funny how far behind the United States is when we're having these conversations. PM: It's so fascinating to have that comparison across jurisdictions. I was interested when you were talking about those two bills, obviously the bargaining one that you're talking about, the California Journalism Preservation Act is quite similar to what we've seen in Canada and Australia with its variations. And I remember, when those bills in Australia and Canada were being proposed, there were people who were saying it'd be so much better just to tax digital advertising, put it into a fund, and give that to journalists or publishers or whatever that way. Did you have a preference between these two bills and the model to set up? And when you were looking abroad and comparing what was happening in California to what had happened in Canada and Australia, was there much difference in the structure of this bargaining process that California was trying to set up? MP: That's a really great question, because that's one of the challenging parts of actually trying to turn media policy into a reality. I've seen a lot of people say: Oh my God, this bargaining code stuff, it's really confrontational. Google and Meta, they're just going to threaten to pull out of your country, which is something that Meta has done in Canada, and both of them have threatened in Australia, Canada, and also the US, which is considering a type of this legislation at the federal level. The thing is, attacks is just harder to pass politically in terms of like the politicians that you're dealing with. Like it's uglier to pass a tax when you're a lawmaker and maybe you're in a vulnerable district and you're seen as something like imposing costs. It was really interesting in California to be able to try out the two different models of accountability anti-monopoly legislation that people have been talking about because we actually got to road test what something like an advertising tax would look like here. And it was harder. It was harder because of the branding problem with having something called a tax. The other thing is that, in the business lobby, they have a built-in reflexive reaction to that kind of policy, which is that they dragged in a bunch of small business owners who digitally advertise on Google and Meta and said: Oh my God, if you tax the advertisements for Google and Meta, they're just going to pass on those advertisement costs to us. And like, first of all, it was really funny is that there was a group of 150 small businesses in California that signed a letter saying like: Oh my God, don't tax big tech. We're going to be the ones who bear the cost for it. Of course they were organized by like a big tech AstroTurf group because like what plumbing company is sitting there in Marietta, California, thinking about like how badly like big tech regulations going to hurt them, right? But the other thing is that like, I actually went and looked up each one of these businesses on the Google and meta advertising databases and found that most of them weren't actually actively advertising on either one of these platforms. So I'm like: It sounds like an advertising tax... not going to be a problem for you. \[laughs\] But it was so strange because on one hand, This was total bullshit at the sort of legislative level. But when you're a lawmaker and you're like, you're up for election, you're in a swing district and the chamber of commerce is saying that this is a job killer bill, despite the fact that it would create like a million journalism jobs or something crazy, they're facing brick-and-mortar small businesses coming at them saying that they're going to destroy small business in their communities. The other thing was that for me, it was a really interesting glance at who's also getting exploited by Google and Meta, because a couple of weeks before the legislation died, there was, of course, this federal ruling saying that Google is in fact an unlawful monopoly and has engaged in monopoly behavior to protect that monopoly. And so I'm looking at these small businesses that are getting charged above market prices for advertising. On Main Street, the bike shop or whatever is spending money, sending money to Google, so that they're like: Cannon Bike is going to be the first hit on the, like the 10 blue links, or whatever's left of Google search these days. \[laughs\] It's so crazy because the people who are getting the most exploited by these platforms are the ones coming along and telling the legislature: Oh my God, please protect our predator from hurting us more. And on one hand, I was kind of like: If you're under the thrall of a monopoly, and you're saying that you're concerned that the monopoly is going to pass monopoly prices on to you, I guess that's a pretty good argument. They just weren't phrasing it that way. The other thing is, doesn't that sound fucking illegal? That was the other thing was absolutely crazy about this. So, that was the fight for the digital ad tax that people keep on talking about like: Oh, we don't like the bargaining code stuff. It's a link tax. It violates this fundamental precept of the internet. And so we're like: Okay, we'll also try this other thing. And then the other thing turns out to have this whole other set of arguments against it that also sucked. But on the bargaining code stuff, the way that platforms fight it is that it's just collective bargaining. So what happens in collective bargaining is that sometimes the employer threatens a lockout, and that's what these companies do. It's like: Threaten a capital strike against your country. If your democratically elected officials— they want to regulate these companies. So they're like: We're going to ban journalism in Canada from Meta, which is what happened. So Google made the same kind of threat here in California. So did Meta. But the thing about Google is that, we have a federal judge sitting here saying that Google has maintained an illegally monopolied marketplace that all of us are trapped on. Google has been paying tens of billions of dollars to competitors to ensure that they do not compete against Google in the market for general search, where they have like, what, 90% of the market for general searches on search engine, and more than that for mobile. It's crazy. We're totally captured by Google. So this illegal monopoly is threatening to ban our journalism from its monopoly marketplace if we don't comply with its terms. I'm sitting here, thinking: Doesn't that also sound fucking illegal? \[laughs sarcastically\] I felt like I was losing my mind here in the closing weeks of the session where I'm like: we have these gigantic companies where it seems like most people know that there's a huge problem here. And it seems like they're doing things that feel like they should be illegal, and they're happening anyway. And our governor seems to be going along with it. And ultimately, so did a lot of the publishers in our industry, who decided to cave in the end and take a really crappy background deal. It was a very sobering experience for me as someone who's been a really strong advocate for journalists and a strong advocate for unionization. An advocate for our industry, thinking about all this stuff completely differently... to watch the people who should have been guided by their own greed. No one has more to gain from strong monopoly action than shitty media companies. And even in the end, they couldn't pass the marshmallow test. They took the easy money instead of going for the regulation. It was very unsettling for me. PM: It's so wild to hear that and to have kind of watched it unfold more recently. I'll ask you about that capitulation in just a minute, but before I do that, you were talking there about these local businesses who the tech monopolies were able to get to come into the legislature and kind of argue for their position, basically, to say: Don't regulate us. Don't make us have to charge these taxes. Don't make us have to pay any money toward journalism. I was interested because in one of the pieces that you wrote, you talked about how there was deceptive arguing sometimes behind the scenes by people who were obviously getting money from these major tech companies. That was something I remember seeing up here in Canada as well — not just with the news bill, but also with this bill that we had that was regulating the streaming industry — where you not only had a lot of disingenuous arguments being made that felt like they were coming from the tech monopolies, but not directly through the mouths of their spokespeople, but then also experts who would be interviewed in media, experts who would be talking about these bills who were really repeating the talking points of the tech companies, but were not officially attached to them. I wonder if you saw much of that happening down there as well in these processes. MP: 100%. And look, on a very crass level, I have to hand it to Google for playing us like a guitar because it turns out that you can like, purchase the friendliness of the news industry for not-all-that-much money. The Google News Initiative — it's a sort of philanthropic and publisher support program that Google's booted up — they'll give grants to small digital publishers. And sometimes those grants are only like $20,000. But the thing is, when you're a small digital publisher, because you're operating in Google's monopoly marketplace and you can't really make good money existing on the internet when you're trying to do hyper-local news — 20 grand, like that is a lifeline. When you're that kind of starving publisher, yes, you'll take the money. And they also will run workshops to see, like: Are you running a sustainable business model? Here are things that you could be doing better. And the thing is, in the abstract, None of that's bad. Some of that's good. A lot of people do need help running their businesses better. One of the reasons you see so many journalists unionizing is, in fact, there are a lot of people running the industry who are making some very bad decisions. Yes. Businesspeople in the journalism industry need a lot of help, and they also need some capital. But the thing is, that lifeline turned into a leash as soon as Google started feeling threatened by regulation. And so one of the things that's not really out there in the public is: What exactly was Google communicating to these publishers that it gives money to? Because the organizations that get money from them very mysteriously appeared to be in lockstep with Google's positions — whether it came to opposing the bill in its initial form, or making specific demands about what type of media to exclude — to, in the end, rallying support for a backroom deal that was ultimately supported by almost no one except Google and Governor Newsom. It was something that made me very cynical because in our industry, we spend a lot of time talking about independence. Whether it's independence from our sources and the subjects that we're covering, or independence from the government that we're supposed to be holding accountable. But we've been utterly captured by these gigantic platforms in terms of the grants that they give to small newsrooms. We've been captured by the messaging that they deploy when they're fighting against regulation, which gets really faithfully repeated by a lot of people. We're captured in how we display our journalism to the public, news outlets rearranging their websites to make them more findable through SEO. And they have captured the lawmakers who would regulate the marketplace that we operate in. Ultimately, they can fight off legislation and regulation with this combination of control. It's very disillusioning to me because, as journalists, we're on the opposite side of the ecosystem. A labor union is practically the only entity in this whole array of parties that can't get bought off by Google. There's no way for Google to give us money. So I don't think it's a surprise that in the end, we were the ones yelling loudest about how crappy this whole thing was. PM: It makes perfect sense. And speaking about that backroom deal, can you fill us in a bit more about what happened there? So there were these two bills that were being proposed, and then at the end of August — August 21, I believe it was — all of a sudden it was like they were off the table, and this new agreement was there in place. What is that, and what happened? MP: So in the closing weeks of the legislative session, it had become clear, from what I can tell, that Governor Gavin Newsom, who hadn't said anything publicly about any of this, that he was just not going to sign anything that Google didn't agree to. This is one of the things that was very different from how things played out in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waged a pretty public campaign in defense of Canadian media and against these American platforms that were essentially crumpling the industry like a soda can. PM: I'll just say we saw a lot of that in Australia as well, even from their politicians, too. MP: There were public officials that were standing up for the news industry because they saw that this was predatory threats by monopolies. That's one of the things that makes this dynamic so different for the US is that, I think other countries can see a little bit more clearly what's going on because they aren't American companies that are doing the threatening. There is a little bit of a nationalist component in there, but we definitely didn't see anything like that from Governor Newsom standing up to the blackout threats to censor journalism in California. Didn't see anything from Newsom about the need for monopolies to return some of their monopoly profits to the industries that they're exploiting... nothing like that. That basically drove sponsor Assembly Member Buffy Wicks to negotiations with Google to see if there could be some kind of settlement, maybe along the lines of what Canada ultimately agreed to. In Canada, that was a deal for $100 million CAD every year to be distributed to a fund to distribute among Canadian newsrooms. So that would've been about like $75 million US. That's for a country with a similar population as California. But the deal that emerged from the backroom in California, Google was only going to contribute $15 million in year one to a fund to distribute to California newsrooms, followed by 10 million a year after that. So despite having very similar legislation, despite having a probably vastly more valuable marketplace, California ended up with a vastly worse deal than the one that Canada got. And a lot of people think Canada's deal was not nearly good enough; there are a lot of concerns right now that Canadian news outlets are going to get a much diluted form of payout ultimately from this Google settlement. So there's a lot of people raising concerns that even Google had pulled something over on the Canadians after they waged a much tougher fight. So, California just got totally steamrolled. And there was this bizarre situation where the state and the sponsor and the publishers got totally flattened in these backroom negotiations, but they felt compelled to come out with this very flowery press release about how great it was and how this is going to help save media in California. We were looking at this, and we were very conscious of the international context around this legislation. And we were very keenly aware of how badly we'd just gotten beaten. It was very surreal to see the same publishers — some of whom had been defending Google, and some of whom had been criticizing Google and embarking on this anti-monopoly crusade in the first place — they're all saying: Well, it's not as much money as we would like, but it seems good; better than nothing. And so that became the mantra, is that like: When you're starving, you'll take crumbs. And I'm sorry, as a journalist, If you're starving, crumbs are not going to fill you up. You need a meal. And we need to go fight for a meal. Because I don't think $15 million spread across California with some state subsidies thrown in is gonna reverse the decline of journalism in California for anybody. At the Los Angeles Times, where I took a buyout earlier this year, I think last year, the deficit at the LA Times alone was going to be something like, what, $37 million? So if you chuck a couple million bucks at that whole $35 million deficit next time... I just negotiated the layoffs of 150 of my coworkers, like, yeah, that's really going to help me, man. \[laughs sarcastically\] So for those of us who have had to suffer through the inaction of regulators, and to live through the inability of the news industry to fight off these monopolies, we're still going to be suffering the consequences of a really bad deal. That's why you're seeing journalists being the ones who are most roundly denouncing this deal. PM: There are a couple of things I want to ask you about that. I feel like maybe for some people, they would think: Okay, publishers are making this deal. This must be good for journalists, right? Assuming that the journalists are the same as the places that they work for. Can you pull that apart for us? MP: This is something that's complicated because we have overlapping interests as journalists with publishers, but our interests aren't exactly the same. In California, for example, the number of journalists employed by newspapers has declined faster than the number of newspapers. The bottom line is that, whenever your workplace gets the cold, it's going to be the workers who get the flu because the company will lay off journalists, but do so in a way that makes it able to stay in business. So if you're in that position and you're looking at a subsidy where it's like: Well, maybe I'll get like $5,000 a journalist out of this deal, or $10,000 a journalist out of this deal, in the upper ranges of what could be possible here. If you're a publisher, you'll take $10,000 a head over nothing. That's not no money at all. So I do acknowledge that. The reason that we're pushing back much harder as journalists and as labor is that we're actually the ones here who are used to fighting companies that are being stupid, and used to fighting companies that are holding all the cards, and we know that you have to drive much harder to get a better deal. One of the real problems for accepting a settlement with crumbs is that you take away the incentives for publishers to continue driving for anti-monopoly action in the marketplace because I just saw what happened when all the publishers teamed up and said: Okay, yeah, we'll take this little deal from Google in exchange for nothing. The journalists are screaming their heads off, and the governor and the legislature were kind of like: Well, I guess we'll agree with the publishers instead of the journalists. So that's one of the problems when you have dance partners who aren't willing to fight like they need to. When you're taking on a $2,000,000,000,000 monopoly, you have to have some real backbone there. It was only the journalists who were used to fighting really hard against giant companies, ironically. One of the that's really distasteful about these kinds of fights is that we're actually kind of aligned with a lot of the media companies that we spend the rest of our time yelling at. The LA Times hasn't had a contract in a couple of years, like the journalists at the LA Times haven't gotten raises in three years. Nonetheless, we're standing alongside the LA Times and the legislature saying that like: Yeah, actually we need anti-monopoly action because we hate our stupid employer right now. We need raises, but at the same time, we can't bargain and strike for money that our employer doesn't even have. And that's the basic premise of one of the reasons you see labor standing next to employers that they're normally yelling at is that , look, stealing and stealing, whether you like the companies that are being stolen from or not. Because it turns out that people do work there, and a lot of these companies are unionized and you do have very aggressive unions now for places like the News Guild who will bargain hard and strike for that money, but we can't go on strike against Google. That's one of the things that's crazy about this is that, this is like if the union had sent its leadership into a backroom with the employer, and it came back with this dogshit tentative agreement where everyone would get like a 0.5% raise, and you threw that at the membership. The membership would have just voted no and gone on a wildcat strike. But we can't do that here because we don't have the right to collectively bargain with Google and do stuff to basically engage in industrial action with Google, because they're not our direct employer. Despite controlling our industry, we can't negotiate with this entity that essentially directs what we do in a very macro sense. The other thing is when you talk about money that small, it's going to be really hard to actually notice it in the newsroom. If it makes the employers less likely to fight for the real money and to fight for structural change, then I have no reason to believe that we're not going to be facing more layoffs across the entire industry next year. One of the things that's really concerning to me actually is not just the continued decline of legacy media — and people have a lot of complicated feelings about that. It's like: US media is doing a bad job of covering the presidential election, or they're doing a bad job of covering Gaza. Like: Let's look to new media, who can maybe cover these things better in a way that engages people. There's some reports coming out that new digital media startups have plummeted over the last couple of years. That's because the money isn't there. There's no business model. There is no marketplace for this, even when you're doing innovator stuff. The success stories are very few and far between in the journalism industry, and a lot of times the success stories are funded by Google. PM: When you talk about the backroom deal that was made between Google and the legislature and the publishers, another piece of this is that there's a big AI component to it, which I'm sure is something that a lot of journalists are not eager to see implemented into the newsroom and into their industry. MP: So as part of this backroom deal, separate from the subsidy that would be paid to newsrooms, there is a proposal for a national AI accelerator that is funded by Google. And I've read that Open AI has also volunteered to donate some technology to it. What this AI accelerator would do is not clear. One of the things that the term sheet said is that the nonprofit or the entity that would host the AI accelerator will be governed by the people that donate to it. So what it sounds like to me is that the illegal monopoly that already controls our industry is going to have a new program to allow its technology to further wrap its tentacles around how we do journalism, so that it becomes even harder for us to extricate ourselves from a business model that isn't even legal. I have a lot of questions about that. Look: we're journalists. We use technology every day, and technology changes the way that we report, allows us to connect with people. If you can use machine learning to identify craters, to see which US munitions have been used to bomb civilian targets in Gaza, which is something that the New York Times did, sign me up for that stuff. That's the kind of journalism that can be really impactful, and the technology can help, and we've done something good in the world. You've got these genius engineers at Google, some of whom are members of the Alphabet Workers Union, of the CWA, our kin. They're really great people. There is good technology to be had out of this. The problem is that we're setting up in such a way that it's not journalists who are controlling its development. I think if you look at what technology has done to journalism over the last 10 years... it was journalists who figured out how to make Twitter work for them. It was journalists who figured out how to be like really good on Instagram and TikTok. I know there's this argument about content creators versus journalists, but I'm like: We're all in the same ecosystem. If you're performing the functions of a journalist, you're a journalist. And some people are really good on different platforms, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where Google is going to be the party that creates a more humane, intelligent, responsive form of journalism when they just engaged in this spectacularly cynical spectacle as part of the democratic process. PM: That's a really good point, and I think that leads us into some of these bigger questions about the industry and that journalism itself is facing that I wanted to get to as part of this discussion. When you talk about this problem with journalism, and the proper funding of journalism, and what the future of journalism is going to look like, do you think that the tech companies and the big tech monopolies — the Googles and Metas in particular — are chief to blame for the problems that we've been seeing in journalism over the past couple decades, becoming really acute in the past few years? Or do you think that is this part of a broader ecosystem? When you really drill down into it, is it the tech companies at the core that are causing these really fundamental and structural problems? MP: My feeling is that Google and Meta, they're just one or two problems of many in the journalism industry. That is very clear to anyone who actually works in our business. If you got rid of the platforms tomorrow, that is not going to change the editor-in-chief. That is not going to remove private equity's control of a lot of local newsrooms. So it's obviously just one piece. The one thing I would say though, is that by the nature of being tech monopolies, they are the one factor that touches practically everybody. So for that reason, I think they are the one factor that we now need to make a more concerted push at figuring out how to restrain, or how to bring back some of the monopoly profits to the people who are getting profited from, or breaking them up. I do think that like they have an overarching quality that the other problems in the journalism industry don't have, because one of the things that you'll commonly hear — as a guild, we're one of the ones who say this frequently, is like: it was Wall Street that destroyed local news. It was hedge funds. It was private equity. They bought up a bunch of local newsrooms, consolidated, laid people off, did mergers. It was all fueled by debt. All that stuff is totally true. The problem is that stuff doesn't explain why so many of the public media stations in California have also been laying off people, too. That stuff doesn't explain why it's been so hard for small- or even medium-sized digital newsrooms to become sustainable. It's an important problem in our industry, and that's why you have so many unions that have popped up over the last five years: the News Guild, the Writers Guild of America East, another excellent union. It lacks the explanatory power for why we're seeing so many declines across so many different types of media and types of ownership. Even right now, some of the success stories that we can look to, like 404 Media — that's from the folks who were formerly of Motherboard at Vice; brilliant startup, journalist-run — you're seeing a lot of interest in journalist co-ops. It is not an accident. I think that some of the few success stories that we can see in digital media right now are very small startups that require almost no capitalization at all. That, to me — I mean, it's great. Cooperization is one of the things that my local promotes. We just had a unit in Long Beach form a journalist co-op, which is really cool. The problem is that stuff doesn't scale. When you're looking at the problems at the scale of Bureau of Labor Statistics, you're talking about the loss of tens of thousands of local journalism jobs getting offset by a handful of very small, successful business models. I think there's a lot of dogma in the journalism industry about what works and what doesn't work. In fact, one of the things that really concerns me — as one of the few voices in these debates that specifically represents the interests of journalists rather than the interests of publishers — is that there is a vibrant policy space for figuring out how to do things to bring local news back to communities. But that policy space is dominated by publishers, the same publishers who have had a hand driving the industry in the ground, who have laid off so many journalists. Also from the philanthropic sector, which has been revving up its giving and has taken a lot of interest in how you can build a more benevolent local news structure. The problem is, from the journalist perspective, some of those proposals aren't very realistic. Some of those aren't even to fund things that are journalism at all. There's a real class divide in newsrooms between journalists and executives and everybody else about the utility of artificial intelligence to the kind of work that we do. I think those kind of class divides have really come in sharp relief for me in these legislative fights, because I do think there are many places where the interests of journalists and the interests of publishers diverge. Technology is one of those big places because, you look at something like artificial intelligence, like: Okay, if we can agree — and it's not even a given that we can agree that there's a monopoly problem in the journalism industry — artificial intelligence can look really tempting to a publisher where it's like: Well, if it's cheaper to get a license from Open AI than to hire another five journalists, then why don't we try experimenting with the Open AI license? Why don't we try summarizing public meetings instead of hiring a reporter to sit through the school board when something may not happen? That's something where the interests of journalists and publishers are not the same thing, and I think that's a place where publishers will strike a deal with monopoly if it offers them that technology because it's easier and because it's cheaper. And ultimately, a lot of the things that journalists are demanding are expensive. Investigative journalism's fucking expensive. It's really expensive to just sit on one story for six months that may not even pan out. And the best AI-assisted investigations is not going to be the stuff where you're producing like, five stories a day. It's going to be your training models that have to pick through data and satellite imagery to look for war crimes. So that's a place where the interests of journalists and publishers really differ, too. And that's one of the places where, having a monopoly problem , there's less incentive from employers to deal with that than there are from the journalists. PM: Yeah, I think it's a really good point around the new startups versus the legacy organizations. I'm as excited as anybody to see the 404 Medias and the Aftermaths, but also, if you lose those institutions, there's something really important that's being lost there because while the small new startups are important, they don't fully replace what's lost if you lose these major newspapers — say, the public broadcasters, or these sorts of things that really provide important coverage, important local news, and have a bit more power to push back against the other powerful forces in society, if you can put it that way. MP: That's exactly the problem. And where I counterintuitively defend medium- and larger-size news organizations is that they are some of the very few institutions out there that have the legal, economic, and even ethical fortitude to push back against vexatious litigation. So when you're covering a billionaire who doesn't like what you're printing about them, and that billionaire, like Elon Musk, can threaten litigation to destroy your entire news outlet... if you don't have media liability insurance, if you can't afford to hire an expert in First Amendment law or defamation law, that is something that can very easily drive your news organization into the ground, and that's something that we already see, I think, with independent journalists. Here in Los Angeles, some of the journalists who are doing the most aggressive coverage of local law enforcement are independent journalists, and sometimes that's because traditional newsrooms just won't employ those kinds of journalists for a variety of reasons, but what that also means is that those independent journalists are far more exposed when they're getting harassed by law enforcement. We had one case here where someone was actually sued by the LA City Attorney because they published information. It was headshots of LAPD officers that they had obtained through a public information request. So there are real vulnerabilities to being small and independent in this current environment, where part of the weapons of protecting monopoly and part of the weapons of protecting wealth involve litigation, involve these political and legal ways of trying to smother journalism that weren't something that the founding fathers were thinking of when they were drafting the First Amendment. So there are a lot of different policy things that you could do to try to mitigate against that stuff while preserving independent journalism, like anti-SLAPP statutes and shield laws and things like that. Of course, we have to fight for those things, too. But when it comes to the American tradition of, every now and then, holding the government accountable for how it engages in war around the world, publishing WikiLeaks or doing investigations into war crimes — performing the function of essentially monitoring the national security state — sometimes you need a large news organization that will stand next to you when it comes time to face down and defy a subpoena from a federal judge. That is not a popular argument with people because a lot of times these are companies that we hate. But across the breadth of the historical record, these companies that face a lot of criticism right now do house a lot of talented journalists, and do provide backup for them sometimes when it's really important. PM: I think it's a really good point. Of course, as they have less revenue, it becomes harder to provide that protection — that defense — of that journalism, which is why it's so important to keep some of these institutions strong. I did want to ask you about another piece of this that you were writing about and that you mentioned earlier. There was some discussion of these bargaining codes as a link tax, right? By particular kinds of digital rights people who have certain ideas about how the internet works and didn't want to see these sorts of codes move forward because of what it represented. I always thought that that was a deceptive argument, but in some of your writings, you also talked about how we're seeing this broader shift on the internet away from this reliance on hyperlinks because of the way these tech monopolies are structuring how we use the internet itself. Can you talk to me a bit about that, and what the implications of it are for journalism in particular? MP: Totally. This is something that almost came to me as an epiphany when I was hearing some of the arguments from the tech community against this kind of bargaining code legislation: 'It's like a link tax; you're taxing links; you're taxing information.' So that means you're sort of breaking this rule for how Gen X use the internet. I'm sorry, but some of this is very generational. But I was like: That's kind of interesting because I'm a millennial, and I have grown up on the internet, and I've done most of my journalism digitally. I was thinking about this, and there was this one study out of Canada about Meta's link ban in Canada that turned on a light bulb for me about the really big picture of what's going on here. So Meta, in response to one of these pieces of legislation in Canada, banned journalism in Canada. So if you try to post a news story to Instagram or whatever, you'll get this message saying like: Sorry, the government hates you. That's why we had to remove journalism \[laughs\] from Canadian democracy. PM: That's effectively what it says, yeah \[laughs\]. MP: We can read between the lines \[laughs\]. And so some media academics did this study to study what happened to engagement on Facebook before and after the Meta Canadian link ban. And I love this study because it shows this before-and-after effect of these political groups — Facebook groups that were discussing Canadian politics — and these are the kind of places that are posting a lot of news: whatever Trudeau is up to, and whatever people's mad about today. So before, people are posting a lot of links to Canadian news outlets in these groups. Link ban comes down; they're not posting any of these links anymore because Facebook has censored the news. One of the amazing findings in that study — which, to me, is the little gold nugget that is inside of all this — is that the amount of link sharing had dropped because Meta had killed it, but people were just taking screenshots of the journalism and posting it instead of posting the links. So, they were still posting the journalism in these Facebook groups, and in fact, the study said they were engaging with it equally as much from when they had the links posted in there. But now there were just the screenshots of the text of the most important parts of the article. And people are still just bopping along on Facebook discussing the news, they just had been mildly inconvenienced by Meta. So, that was like: Oh, I get it now, because what you're seeing across the breadth of the platforms — practically all of them, not totally — like, there is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It's something that's operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk's version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach from displaying a lot of links. That's why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days. Instagram itself has always been hostile to linking; TikTok as well. We have been departing, for a while now, the internet of hyperlinks. So that was one of the things when I was looking at these arguments from the tech community that like: Oh, hyperlinks are one of these building blocks of the internet, and if you do this bargaining code thing, Meta is going to be incentivized to just ban hyperlinks. I'm looking at this, and I'm like: That's where Meta is already going. They don't need a law. The law just happened to bring Canada to where Meta was going first. Look around. We're entering a post-hyperlink internet that, with artificial intelligence, like if they can figure out generative AI, and it's not necessarily a given that they will, like you can see this in Meta and Google are experimenting with is that if you degrade hyperlinks and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this like stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that's out there and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal. The thing that's brilliant about that is that you can just stick your ads next to it, or have people pay to be featured in the summaries. And then your monopoly engine has only gotten stronger. That was a real epiphany to me because the arguments against one form of this legislation was that like: Oh my God, you'll destroy this fundamental way of how the information works. And I'm like: Dude! These companies are already destroying the fundamental way of how this information works! Am I the only one who notices this?! Because I'm sitting here on my stupid phone, and I can't find journalism anymore because I can't figure out how to get reliable news on Instagram in a timely way. It's something that's been going on under the radar for a while. And I think it makes something like a data mining tax, an advertising tax, more attractive over time, just because we're moving toward a post-hyperlink internet. But it was really funny to me that some of the people who oppose this legislation were like: This is just going to incentivize clickbait. And I'm like: I'm not clicking on anything anymore, are you? That's just not how people are consuming things on the actually existing internet on my phone. So that was one of the other things that really surprised me because I'm not somebody who comes from very dogmatic internet policy circles and internet libertarian policy. This is something that I was learning organically from the internet that I was actually on. And I feel like I was looking at a different internet as the people that we were arguing with, because I'm like: You're the experts, right? You're the people who are the internet policy experts, but I feel like you're describing an internet that I don't use anymore, and I am almost 40. PM: It's a real nostalgia, but it's also a misunderstanding or almost a deceptive framing of what the legislation was, because often these legislation would talk about the facts that yes, there were links to news from Google and from Meta, but it was not actually saying we're going to tax each one of those links individually. It's just, you benefit from the fact that these news articles are on your website. You're running ads next to them. Some of that money should go back to journalism. I think that observation that you made around decline of the hyperlinks, it really feels like the ultimate extension or the end point of this platformization of the internet, where you have the Amazons and the Facebooks that want everything to happen on their platform, and want us to be more engaged, and be spending more time there, and looking at more ads and spending more money. Now, we've reached the point where Facebook really doesn't want you to go anywhere else. It wants to control the social media experience; like you've said, and like you've written about, all these social media companies are trying to adapt to the TikTok algorithm and do something similar to make you even more engaged. And Google is using this generative AI and has been making changes to its search platform for years to further discourage hyperlinking and to make sure you can get the answer right there on Google instead of going anywhere else. So I think it makes total sense that we're seeing this idea of the hyperlink being central to the internet really breaking down because of these platforms. MP: You'll see it everywhere once you start looking for it. Even if you just think about TikTok, and the way that some people will consume news on TikTok — which is that you'll have influencers who are really good at communicating and connecting over that medium. To be honest, not everyone is good at that stuff, and some people have a real talent for it. And I really applaud them for it because they are actually an important part of the ecosystem. But when you think about how they're presenting information, they are voracious readers. They will read the news; they will follow what's going on. And then they'll sort of summarize in the more easily digestible way for the platform, but sometimes there'll just be the screenshot in the background, the person's pointing and it's their floating head, and they're still getting your journalism out there to people, which is great. And I should say that from a journalistic perspective and somebody who's kind of on the opposite side of the ecosystem, that's actually how it's supposed to work. When journalism works — just regular, not fancy, workaday journalism — it very much depends on having an ecosystem around it because you shouldn't have to be a subscriber to a local newspaper or whatever to benefit from what that newspaper publishes. I was part of a team that covered the leaks of audio from LA City Council people saying some racist stuff and talking about redistricting behind closed doors, and you didn't have to be a reader of the LA Times to be impacted by what that journalism did in Los Angeles. You had public officials resigning, and there was a lot of reaction to it, and a lot of reflection on like what LA is these days. The thing is, journalism isn't an exclusive club. The information is supposed to be out there, and somebody else reads the story; they do their own riff on it. Somebody else follows up on the reporting. It doesn't matter whether they're a radio station or a TV station, or if they're on TikTok, Instagram, or Substack, if they're live streaming: they're talking about the work. They're getting people to engage in what's going on. They're getting people to engage in politics and talk about holding their elected officials responsible. So when you have someone on TikTok pointing at your story and saying how great it is, you're not getting any traffic from that, but you've done your job. So, we have this tech ecosystem that is capable, doing really good things. It's really capable of informing a lot of people very quickly about what's going on. It's capable of bringing a lot of quality information to people. But the system's not designed to do that. You have people who are just hacking in all these workarounds. You see this on X (Twitter), where people are just posting screenshots now without adding the links to them because they want people to see the stuff, but if you add a hyperlink to it so people can see the full story, Elon's gonna suppress it. So that's one of those things where it's like: God, man, we have all these smart people who mean really well, and they're capable of so much, and they've built some really cool stuff. And I just sit here wondering: What would all this look like if any of this was actually built for humans? PM: Oh yeah, I feel you on that one \[laughs\]. Sometimes it's great. Other times it's like: What is going on here? MP: This is why I think it's so important that the Alphabet workers join the Alphabet Workers Union, and that Meta workers unionize, and that there's worker power inside of these companies. Because I'm sitting here yelling at their boss, and their boss is crushing our industry under an iron glove. There are some freaking cool people who work at Google. And I'm like: what kind of news ecosystem would they build for us if they had their way? Because I think it would be pretty cool, and I think this conversation would look totally different. PM: I feel you on that. To clarify what I was saying as well, there are a lot of times I run into a product that seems really cool in theory, and then you try to use it and you learn it's mainly made for people who know how to code. And it's like: Come on, please think about all the rest of us, who are most of us. To end off our conversation, I'd be remiss not to ask you a bit about generative AI, because that's what everyone's talking about the past year and a half. How do you see that impacting the journalism industry and journalists, as we've been having these companies push it for the past year and a half — but also a lot of companies making hiring decisions, investment decisions based on the hype around it — and what kind of impacts that has? MP: I think generative AI as it's currently constituted is a short-term phenomenon. What I mean by that is that there's a lot of hype around it, and if you go to an everyday reporter, that reporter is going to really be challenged to find something that's very applicable for what they're doing because the central requirement of the kind of work that we do is that we have to be accurate. When we're doing our job well, we're doing original inquiry and reporting, and those are two things that, fundamentally, a large language model is just not constructed to do. It's fancy text prediction. When you're a reporter, you can't make predictions because that's when you're really showing your ass. There are some real, fundamental application problems for very basic writing and journalism. You could see news employers try to cut copy desks for more limited forms of generative AI. You could set them loose on trimming stories automatically, or checking for grammar. That's a more plausible use case for journalism and newsrooms that could involve publishers trying to cut corners. The other short-termism problem that I think generative AI has is, do we even know how much this stuff really costs? Because it seems as though a lot of it's operating at a massive loss for companies like Open AI. It's very energy intensive. It's really capital intensive. You're starting to see publishers actually stick up for themselves and threaten litigation against these companies. So, every aspect of production for generative AI, from employing the engineers, to building data centers, to paying for the power, to paying for licensing the material that's being trained on... all that stuff is probably driving costs up for generative artificial intelligence. So if you have newsrooms that are looking to adopt that technology, maybe it has an affordable rate right now, if it's something you're paying for, but once the subsidies go away and those companies actually look to try to turn a profit, like how much is that going to cost you, and is it worth what you're getting out of it? That's one of the things that's very much not answered yet, so it's hard to know if it would have a long-term impact on the news industry, which is already strapped for money. I have my doubts about the long-term impacts of generative AI on the news industry. The other thing is, some of it's a little bit more innocuous. Like you could have a news industry getting better at recommendation algorithms for different stories. That's a place where I think a lot of publications are relatively in the Stone Age, so to speak. Like they haven't TikTok-ified in terms of figuring out which one of their stories to put in front of people. I don't know how to feel about that on a basic moral level as a journalist. My own bias is that we need to have more intentionality in the news industry and more conscientiousness about what we're presenting to people because I think the valuable thing that we bring to the process as journalists is, in fact, our subjectivity. I don't mean that in the sense of having a really sharp partisan point of view on something. What I mean is that there were people who made real, clear judgments on what they thought was important, and it's going to be different from what other people think. I think that's the valuable thing that humans bring to the process of journalism, is that there is a human consciousness in here that thought that it was really important that your congressman was saying some racist shit. That is a very essential part of the process that I think gets overlooked quite a bit. It's something that maybe a large language model or machine learning technology can approximate, but I just don't think we're nearly there yet, and I don't know if you can do it at a cost that would even remotely scale. I'm kind of a skeptic. I'm not anti-technology, of course; I would love to see investigative desks that are really rigorous ethically and conscientious about what they produce. I kind of want to see what they can do with machine learning technology, which they already embrace to some degree when scraping through massive data sets. I just think that the actual applications that are going to change journalism are going to be the things that the journalists themselves come up with, because I think anybody in the C-suite is too far removed from the production process to have a reliable sense of the power of this technology. PM: I think that's a really good point. The human journalists are essential both to that judgment role, but also to having this broader knowledge of the beat and what they're reporting on. I think we've seen time and again these tech companies promise us one thing and deliver something else. And I think the cost of these tools is going to become very apparent sooner rather than later. Matt, really great to talk to you, to dig into all this with you. Thanks so much for taking the time. MP: Thank you so much for caring about this. It's really important.