Thread by @bcmerchant

This week, in a genuinely stunning series of events, a bill that was written to save local journalism from big tech was gutted in a backroom deal—and wound up bailing out Google and *boosting AI* instead. You can't make this stuff up.

Here's how it happened.

The CA Journalism Preservation Act, was one of two bills that passed CA's legislative bodies with supermajority, bipartisan support.

Like laws in Canada and AUS that generate millions for newsrooms, they charge big tech for profiting from sharing news on their platforms.

But.

Naturally, Google *hated* this bill. It did everything in its power to kill it—turning off News access, running ads during the Olympics, funding astroturf groups to oppose it. All the stuff you can do when you're a tech monopoly.

[The full story is here]

bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-a-bill-m…

It even tapped the California Chamber of Commerce to bring in the famously pro-tech journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, funding his travel to California to testify against the bill, and to write a report that opposed it. Jarvis has declined to disclose to me how much they paid him.

Meanwhile, actual working journalists, who had formed a cautious alliance with the bill's sponsor, Buffy Wicks, and, in a very rare move, publishers themselves, put themselves on the line to support CJPA. Here was a real chance for structural reform to save local news.

Folks like @mattdpearce and the @MediaGuildWest made the rare move of advocating for the bill. They fought for two years to build support, to ensure mechanisms were in place that would direct funds *to journalists* not executives.

And then word came that Gavin Newsom would veto.

@mattdpearce @MediaGuildWest The CA governor has national ambitions, and would rather not piss off Google than stand up for journalists, is the short of it. So he stayed silent, and, sources say, quietly threatened a veto.

The bill was effectively dead, but what happened next was the truly bizarre part.

@mattdpearce @MediaGuildWest Neither journalism bill had *at any point* contained language on AI.

Now, in the 11th hour, here comes this deal, cut between Google, legislators and publishers—and 0 journalists—that suddenly includes public funding, and *an AI accelerator*.

Journalists were stunned and livid.

@mattdpearce @MediaGuildWest I am! I am stunned and livid! There is so far only a press release that this deal has been made, containing, completely out of nowhere, endorsements from an OpenAI executive—and no details as to how or why it happened this way. The AI stuff has just not been explained at all.

@mattdpearce @MediaGuildWest And so we have a dark and perfect portrait of our moment—big tech profiting from the destruction of a an industry that provides a vital public service, and thwarting an effort to rein it in with a backroom deal with power brokers whose solution is... more funding for tech.

@mattdpearce @MediaGuildWest Anyway, there's a lot more in the newsletter, including Google's sketchy accounting of how much it's pledging.

And if there's going to be any substantive change, we journalists are going to have get used to fighting. This was just the first round.

bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-a-bill-m…

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