Jim Hartman: Needed: The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act

Local news is facing an existential threat of survival, with newspapers closing, ad revenues plummeting and many rural communities becoming “news deserts” without access to local reporting.

More than a century of healthy profits and strong newsroom cultures established newspapers as the principal watchdogs and chroniclers of news in every community.

But the collapse of the once-mighty newspaper industry has been astonishingly swift.

American newspaper advertising hit its all-time high in 2005 of $49.5 billion. Ten years later, the fall from the 2005 peak was precipitous, down to $8.8 billion in 2015.

In 2000, the combined weekday circulation of America’s newspapers was 55.8 million. By 2018, it had shrunk to 28.6 million, a 49 percent decrease.

That wouldn’t be a big problem if digital revenues — ads or subscriptions — significantly offset the losses. But they didn’t.

When the collapse started to accelerate beginning around 2008, newspapers slashed their operations to the bone.

Here are the grim facts:

• Between 2004 and 2020, the United States lost a quarter of its newspapers, dropping from almost 9,000 to 6,700.

• The closures included 70 dailies and more than 2,000 weeklies or non-dailies, often the only source of news in their communities.

Print journalism is never coming back in the form in which it dominated news consumption, but we need a replacement — or replacements — urgently.

On average, two local newspapers die every week.

These deaths did not start with the creation and spread of the internet. They only started after Google and Facebook gained their near-monopoly in the online advertising market.

For every dollar spent advertising on news websites, Google and Facebook keep about 50 cents. This is why, despite traffic to news websites being up 40 percent since 2014, news site revenue is down 58 percent.

Google and Facebook, which produce no news on their own, are reaping unfair profits from small and local producers that do.

The monopolies held by these Big Tech giants are pushing newspapers across the country out of business.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), daughter of a newspaperman, and John Kennedy (R-Louisiana), a colorful conservative lawyer , first introduced “the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act” (JCPA) in March 2021. It now has 13 additional co-sponsors from both parties.

Proponents contend that to preserve strong, independent journalism, we have to make sure news organizations are able to negotiate on a level playing field with the online platforms that have come to dominate news distribution and digital advertising.

The bill ensures small media outlets will be able to ban together and negotiate for fair compensation from the Big Tech companies that profit from their news content. It would drive earned subscription and ad dollars back to the news publishers who produce journalism.

The bill provides a six-year period of exemption from U.S. antitrust laws for news publishers to collectively negotiate with the Big Tech companies for republishing news content.

It includes an enforcement mechanism such that negotiations resulting in payments are fairly distributed to small and local papers and invested in reporters and newsrooms.

Similar approaches have been taken in Australia, France, New Zealand and Canada.

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post already have their own deals with Big Tech. This bill would put small media companies on equal footing.

The JCPA passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 22, 2022, with strong bipartisan support (15-7).

Google and Facebook spent millions of dollars fighting the JCPA in the Senate. Big Tech hates the bill and their lobbyists succeeded in avoiding a floor vote last year. It was a missed opportunity to help vital journalism.

While the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act has critics, this issue shouldn’t go away. It will be back in 2023.

Without this legislation, many smaller and independent news sources will perish.

E-mail Jim Hartman at lawdocman1@aol.com.