Google follows Newsom in the maintenance of local news in California

From Jean QuangCalmness

This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

Google will pay $ 5 million less than promised a fund designed to help the fight against California newsletters stay on a sailing less than a year after committing to paying $ 15 million.

The company will now pay $ 10 million in the Local News Financing Initiative that will be distributed between California News Publishers, according to the Office of A dispute by Assembly Buffy Wickswho participated in the creation of the program.

Wednesday’s message came a week after governor Gavin News offered to shorten the state’s own share of the first year’s commitment to $ 10 million from $ 30 million as California collides A budget deficit of $ 12 billionS

The new California Civil Media Fund will be administered by the California State Library, which will create representatives of the Board of Publishers to determine how to distribute it in order to “maintain and improve the California news”, according to a Wicks office. The library will also evaluate the regional availability of news reflection in California to help give away money.

Library staff will monitor the Fund’s public dollars to provide public supervision, while Google’s share in money will be housed for a separate non -profit purpose.

“Maintaining local journalism will take all of us – the government, philanthropy and technology sector – are activated together,” Wix said.

Proponents of the new program have identified the money as “seed financing” and said it would attract other donations from philanthropy, interested in financing local journalism – a change in the initial efforts of legislators to fund local news through regulations in the technology sector. Google said it would contribute more money if the state receives private donations.

Jaffer Zaidi, Vice President at Google Alphabet’s mother company, said in a statement that the company was “engaged” by the agreement it made last year.

Google and California promised much more

In its original agreement, The State and Google agreed to pay $ 10 million In the fund annually for four more years, for a total of $ 125 million. Funding now promised less than half of the promised for the first year of the program. The amount paid in the future years can still change, depending on the state budget.

Technical Titan agreed to the deal last August as a have spent a recording An amount of lobbying legislators in California as they examined two bills that would force the company To pay to use the published content of news publications.

Publishers’ defenders and local news have joined the search engine’s ability to profit from links and fragments of news content as a factor that has reduced the news industry across the country over the last two decades. California has lost one -third of its newspapers since 2005, tendentious experts say it worsens civic commitment, polarization and misinformation.

In return for legislators who killed the bills last year, the company agreed instead to help the state launch a fund that would have given $ 125 million to California news newspapers for five years. The bigger part of this money would come from the state taxpayers, while Google also agreed to continue paying its existing grants to news organizations and to pour tens of millions of dollars into an unspecified new artificial intelligence program.

The company will continue to pay these grants, Wicks said Wednesday.

Legislation supporters, including news publishers, journalists’ unions and local news defenders, criticized the handshake deal for being too modest. In contrast, one of the bills would raise about $ 500 million a year fees from Google and other platforms that are associated with news content to pay for a tax credit for local journalists.

Wix, the author of the other bill that would require Google, Meta and other platforms to negotiate payments directly with news publications, said the deal was the best possible result in the background of the opposition of the solid technology industry.

When Newsom announced that the state would reduce its share of funding for the new program last week, it allowed Google to do the same: the company only agreed to invest money in the fund as a coincidence of state dollars.

CalMatters CEO Neil Chase participates in a deal as a member of the board of local independent online news publishers. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the organization, the news or his staff.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.