Gavin Newsom budgets $30 million to help California newsrooms. Will Google do its part?
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is looking to make good on his end of a bargain he struck last year with tech giant Google to pay into a fund that will be distributed to journalism outlets in the state.
The agreement came in lieu of a bill from Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, that would have required Google and Meta, parent of Facebook and Instagram, to pay news outlets for the journalism they feature on their platforms.
That bill was shelved in the waning days of the last legislative session in favor of an agreement with Google in the amount of $180 million over the span of five years, with California taxpayers on the hook for $70 million of that.
As anticipated from last summer’s deal announcement, the Department of Finance is budgeting $30 million to go into the fund, which will be overseen by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Joe Stephenshaw, Newsom’s finance director, said Friday that the state’s remaining share would be paid out in increments of $10 million annually during the next few years.
Google is expected to pay $15 million this year, and then $10 million a year through 2029, for a total of $55 million. The remaining portion of the $180 million agreement will go toward “existing journalism programs,” according to last year’s announcement.
The agreement has met with pushback from labor groups, which had advocated for Wicks’ bill.
Media Guild of the West, which represents journalists throughout the Southwest, issued a statement this week recommending that leaders overhaul the agreement. Guild President Matt Pearce, a former Los Angeles Times journalist, called it “the world’s worst Google news deal” and offered six recommendations for Newsom and California lawmakers to consider.
They include imposing a contribution incentive to encourage other Big Tech companies to donate to the fund “in lieu of allocating public dollars,” restricting public funds from being appropriated to corporate-owned news employers unless they have fair-labor agreements, including public media in the subsidy, and easing eligibility requirements for startup journalist worker cooperatives.
In addition, the guild argued that publishers receiving funds should not control a majority of votes on the journalism fund’s board, and said that California must remove itself and the journalism fund from involvement with Google’s National AI Accelerator, which was part of the agreement.
The funding must still be approved by the California Legislature as part of the state’s budget process. Newsom then must sign the budget bills into law. Lawmakers have a constitutional requirement to pass the budget by June 15.
This story was originally published January 12, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Gavin Newsom budgets $30 million to help California newsrooms. Will Google do its part?."