Bill would compensate true journalists for value of their content

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series designed to draw attention to legislation that will level the playing field for local media outlets.

We live in a time when information described as “news” is often misleading and sometimes downright false. As a result, we all need an information source we can depend on so that we know what’s going on in our communities, so that government doesn’t operate in the dark, and so that the voices in our communities can be heard.

Real journalism matters. Unfortunately, real journalism is imperiled as newspapers such as The Albany Herald are finding it more and more difficult to compete in an environment unfairly controlled by online behemoths such as Google and Facebook.

Online traffic to the Top 50 news sites is up 39% since 2014, and news organizations reach about 136 million U.S. adults each week, according to News Media Alliance.

Despite those numbers, the newspaper industry is struggling financially, with revenue dropping 58% since 2005, NMA says.

Why? The aforementioned Google and Facebook are primary reasons.

The Internet has made it difficult for news organizations to compete financially due to those digital giants, who distribute the news industry’s journalism content on a major scale while paying little or nothing for that content.

The result? Diminished revenues that have led to thousands of journalists being laid off and many local newspapers diminished or shuttered.

But there is a possible solution, News Media Alliance says. The organization has proposed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) as a way to build a sustainable financial path for newspapers.

The bi-partisan bill — which is backed by U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. and U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo. — provides a narrow and limited antitrust “safe harbor” for news publishers to collectively negotiate with Facebook and Google for fair compensation for the use of their content.

The JCPA would help flow subscription and advertising dollars back to publishers, helping to protect quality news gathering and encourage competition.

Small and medium-sized papers, such as The Herald, would be the largest beneficiaries of the bill, which will include an allocation structure to ensure that payments are well-distributed to small- and medium-sized papers.

Let us be clear: In the current landscape, this bill is critical to the long-term survival of newspapers like the Herald and our sister papers of Southern Community Newspapers Inc. That is why we are urging Congress, as well as Georgia’s congressional delegation, to support the passage of the JCPA to ensure that news publishers are fairly compensated by Big Tech for the value of their content.