EDITORIAL: Legislation would bring fairness to news publication

Imagine for a moment that you’re a business owner who has invested a great amount of time, money and sweat equity into creating a product that is essential to the well-being of your community.

Imagine the pride you and your employees take in creating this product that has, over time, become part of the very foundation of your community.

Then imagine that someone comes along and, without your permission and without a minimum of compensation, takes your product and offers it to the public under its banner, collecting funds for the product that it had no part in creating and has no right to tout as its own.

If you can imagine such a thing, hard though it may be, then you have an idea of what it’s like to be in the news publication business in the time of rampant social media.

Newspapers and other publications, many of which have been a part of their communities for more than a century, are having their content disseminated by social media outlets like Google and Facebook with only token compensation, literally sucking the life out of an industry that has been — and continues to be — a vital part of the checks and balances that keep this country’s democracy intact.

Studies show that people are hungry for news content, that the audience seeking such content online is up 39% since 2014, an audience of some 136 million adults each week.

Consider, then, that, conversely, circulation of news publications is down 48% over that time and that revenue produced by those publications is down a staggering 58%.

Imagine, if you’re that hypothetical business person that was mentioned before, that despite all the work that went into the creation of your product, some other company is realizing the profits of your labor. Then consider that 90% of all digital ad revenue produced by social and traditional media is going to Google and Facebook.

Those of us in the news industry are frustrated on a daily basis when we hear former or potential new customers say things like, “I get my news from Facebook.” Because we know, without question, that the majority of the legitimate news that is gleaned from Facebook, Google and other sites was gathered and disseminated by the ever-shrinking professional journalists who are in the trenches still, asking the hard questions and holding leaders and would-be leaders responsible to the public for their actions.

Sure, the “real news” — at least that reported by responsible journalists — often is not as titillating and never is as rife with accusation and innuendo as some of the “news” reported on social media. That’s because the standards of journalism are nonexistent on such sites. But the overwhelming majority of community news publications (70% in a recent study) feature reports that have been vetted by responsible journalists who refuse — who are bound by the ethics of their profession — to allow unsubstantiated trifles to guide their reporting.

This newspaper and others across the nation are asking Congress to pass a Journalism Competition and Preservation Act that would, in the short-term, allow news publishers to negotiate with Facebook, Google and the like for fair compensation. Your support for this legislation would not only benefit those hometown newspapers and publications that bravely continue their efforts to provide the news that is vital to their communities. It would show these social media behemoths that they too are bound by the laws of decency and fairness to compensate the individuals and publications that have, for a large part, been doing their jobs for them.