By The Herald Editorial Board
“As local news disappears, bad things happen,” wrote Margaret Sullivan in 2022, then the media columnist for The Washington Post and now writing for The Guardian.
“Voter participation declines. Corruption, in business and government, finds more fertile ground. And false information spreads wildly,” she wrote in response to a report, the State of Local News by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
In the two years since, as expressed in the report’s most recent edition, the nation’s news deserts have only grown: Since 2005 more than 3,200 print newspapers in the U.S. have vanished, closing at the rate of more than two each week. In 2023, the report says, 130 papers closed and many more reduced operations, eliminating pages or publication days and cutting staff, often by as much as half, for a total loss of more than 7,000 newspaper jobs in 2023 alone.
Newspapers now are facing even higher costs as the Trump administration moves ahead with tariffs against Canada, a major supplier of the newsprint and aluminum plates used in print production.
The Daily Herald, as readers will have noticed, has suffered its own dry spell as it works to regain its feet from layoffs last year. The Herald and other local newspapers and media outlets plug away, continuing to inform, entertain and connect their communities while at the same time working to rebuild a business model that can sustain that work and push back the desert.
Surrounded by deserts, an oasis would be a welcome sight.
At the start of the legislative session, state Sen. Marko Liias, D-Edmonds, proposed legislation that would establish a grant fund to support local journalism outlets in the state, helping sustain salaries and hire additional staff to better cover civic affairs in those communities.
Liias, addressing newspaper representatives earlier in the month, said motivation for the bill followed a conversation with former Herald Publisher Josh O’Connor, about The Herald’s financial struggles.
“I had this aha moment that this pillar of our Snohomish County community could be gone, and it had not settled in my brain that that was a very real possibility,” he said.
O’Connor, Liias said, pointed to legislation proposed recently in California. Ultimately, that bill failed but resulted in an agreement between the state and Google that is expected to provide $250 million over the next five years for journalism grants and other programs.
Liias, referring to the decisions made just at the legislative level, said that work has large and lasting impacts on state residents. Lawmakers, he said, need a healthy corps of journalists reporting on their efforts.
“To not have a lot of eyes on that process is only going to lead to bad outcomes for the people of Washington,” he said.
Liias’ legislation, Senate Bill 5400, advanced out of the Senate’s Labor & Commerce Committee last month — notably with bipartisan support — and was given a hearing before the chamber’s Ways & Means Committee this week.
Amended since its introduction, the bill would establish a business and occupation tax surcharge of 1.22 percent on social media platforms and search engines with revenues of $5 million or more to fund a grant program to be administered by the state Department of Commerce and raising an estimated $74 million over the next four years to support employment of journalists at local newspapers and online and broadcast outlets covering civic affairs in underserved communities.
There has long been caution regarding government involvement in the business of journalism, necessary to avoid the appearance or practice of favoritism that such support might foster.
But the structure of the bill and recent amendments now offer additional separation between the government and the fourth estate. Notably, the legislation now is better focused to levy a tax against social media outlets and search engines, which republish the content of news outlets, rather than more generally against tech companies; while also keeping the funds separate from the state’s general fund and removing lawmakers from decisions on their distribution.
Among those supporting the legislation is the state chapter of the League of Women Voters. Dee Anne Finken, leading local news efforts with the state organization, noted the purpose of that separation in her testimony Tuesday.
“The league does not believe that government should — quote, unquote — bail out the news industry or news outlets, but we do believe that government has responsibility to ensure conditions exist so that local news outlets can do their job of informing all Washingtonians,” she said.
Still, there is opposition, not surprisingly, from the tech firms that would be taxed.
Rose Feliciano, northwest executive director for TechNet, an advocacy association of technology executives, said the legislation is based on the false premise that social media outlets and search engines are responsible for the financial problems of local news journalism, noting that the decline of print journalism began before the rapid growth of the internet in the mid-1990s, and adding that news outlets voluntarily share content on social media and through search engines.
While true that the decline in engagement with journalism for the full range of platforms has been ongoing for years and has been the result of numerous contributing factors, it’s also true that revenue losses — particularly for print journalism — vastly accelerated with the rise of the internet, starting with the evaporation of classified advertising revenue with the advent of Craigslist and other free advertising platforms.
It’s also true that social media hasn’t shied from taking advantage of news media outlets’ need to reach new audiences through Facebook, TikTok, Twitter (now X), Instagram and others. But those same platforms have certainly used that source of information content to their own benefit. A recent Pew Research Center report found that 54 percent of Americans report often or sometimes getting their news through social media sites, a percentage that has been consistent since at least 2020.
Again, journalists and news outlets create that content, not social media sites and search engines, but they do sell their own advertising.
And it’s been a moneymaker for both.
A study from 2019, published by the News Media Alliance, found that Google alone made an estimated $4.7 billion in revenue in 2018 by “crawling and scraping news publishers’ content — without paying the publishers for that use.”
Congress, in late 2022, very nearly adopted legislation — the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act — that would have temporarily suspended some antitrust laws to allow news publishers and broadcasters to collectively bargain with social media companies to negotiate fair compensation for the content the social media sites and search engines use and profit from.
The bill had been included in a must-pass defense spending package, but was bounced from the bill when Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, threatened to pull all U.S. news content from Facebook if Congress adopted the JCPA.
When Canada’s Parliament adopted similar legislation in 2023, Meta made good on that threat, removing access to news stories for its Canadian users. It sacrificed its Canadian markets likely in order to discourage further consideration of such bargaining requirements for its vastly larger U.S. markets.
Washington state should now call the bluff of Meta and other tech giants with its proposal to levy a modest tax that can provide some support to local journalism.
Journalists and the state’s residents need to know that the oasis in the distance is more than a mirage.
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