The debate over Who Destroyed Journalism borders on theology among journalists and our fellow travelers. Particular fanaticisms often reflect when the believer’s heart first got broken by the Fourth Estate. Popular Satans have included “Craigslist,” “Hedge Funds,” “Fox News” and “the publishers who thought it was a good idea to put news on the internet for free.” Like all the best journalistic controversies, there will never be a declared winner; the argument can last as long as you like.
As a skeptic who isn’t above some self-flaggelating, I’m open to blaming everything and everyone, all the way down to the audiences and journalists ourselves. But as a matter of capitalism 101, it also seems reasonable to blame multi-trillion-dollar tech companies possessing the advertising dollars that once funded tens of thousands of news jobs. Although I rarely advise placing trust in a cliche, follow the money is one of the better coinages to circulate in American newsrooms over the past half-century. And so in 2023 and 2024, I chased the trail of missing journalism cash toward Silicon Valley. Like many of California’s classic detective stories, the pursuit ended in heartbreak.
People like to complain about “activist journalists,” but I was surprised to discover how accepting almost everyone was when I became the real thing. During my final years as a Los Angeles Times staff writer, I was the president of The NewsGuild-CWA local union that represented Times journalists and many others across the Southwest U.S., called Media Guild of the West.
Guild presidencies can be hazardous to your career health but are one of the greatest honors in journalism, where day-to-day work otherwise trends oddly toward politeness. The Guild president gets to tangle with billionaires, organize strikes against hedge funds, and transform into an unrepentant public-interest troll whenever the enemies of journalists deserve it — which is frequently. And a lot of people just kind of get it, including some of the managers, many of whom are journalists too and know exactly how bad things have gotten.
Although the job is sometimes to fight the world, the unionized journalist can’t so easily fight a tech platform. Work stoppages are the best tool to claw back raises lost to private equity, but Google doesn’t sit at the bargaining table and doesn’t care if you took a supermajority strike authorization vote. The platform just keeps scraping.
This asymmetry between tech profits and newsroom costs was certainly not lost on the publishers paying the bills. “I would, of course, rather see the famous inflatable rat outside Google’s offices than my newsroom,” former BuzzFeed boss Ben Smith, an occasional target of labor grousing, groused reciprocally in the New York Times. “That’s where the money is.” A rare but narrow area of labor-management agreement, it turns out. When my local broached a rank-and-file resolution authorizing legislative advocacy to make Big Tech to pay its fair share for profiting from journalists’ labor to fund journalism jobs, the debate wasn’t really a debate at all: the motion passed with 100% aye votes. Try getting a large group of journalists to unanimously agree on anything.
So I squired off to Sacramento to share the good word about media labor’s support for two gigantic California bills to make Big Tech pay for news.
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ California Journalism Preservation Act proposed a collective bargaining arbitration process between the news industry and the platforms — with 70% of the proceeds going toward journalism jobs — while Senator Steve Glazer’s SB 1327 proposed a $1 billion data-mining tax to fund schools and journalist employment tax credits. A victory on either would have marked the largest public investment in local journalism since creation of the Corporation Public Broadcasting in the 1960s. There was gold in them hills.
Surprisingly, life as a rank-and-filer perfectly prepared me for advocacy, much moreso than my work as a reporter. Hammering out contract language at the bargaining table is little different from drafting legislation and negotiating amendments with other stakeholders; winning is a matter of organizing the stronger coalition. I came to appreciate why so many labor activists end up in public life.
Also satisfying was the support and the attention drawn to the plight of local journalism. Glazer’s bill passed with a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate. Wicks’ similarly impressive Assembly floor showing drew Republican votes in support; one rose to the floor to quote John Locke before voting yes. Meta had inflamed the situation by threatening to ban journalism from its services in California if Wicks’ bill was enacted, as it had done over a similar law in Canada. This was received as a transparent attempt at bullying. “That was bulls–t,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of California’s powerful Federation of Labor Unions, which endorsed the bill alongside our proud but puny journalist unions, which otherwise avoid politics to protect our journalistic independence. But there’s no feeling in American life like being in a nasty fight and seeing the labor movement have your back.
Then we all learned what it meant to fight a monopoly. Toward the end of 2024, Google became the single largest lobbying spender in the state of California, reporting $10.7 million in lobbying-related expenses between July and September alone. (Its previous largest quarterly lobbying expenditure in the state had been $1.3 million. The journalism bills were that big a threat.) Most of the money was run through front groups, which spent heavily on TV and digital ads against the legislation. The company also dumped money on lawmakers via campaign contributions. During this time, I had been paying for my trips to Sacramento for testimony out of pocket. I couldn’t stomach the idea of taking a salary from the union I had gruelingly helped co-found.
Less expected was the realization that some of California’s publishers were already receiving charitable funding from the Google News Initiative, which Google reportedly threatened to suspend if the legislation was enacted. The only free cheese is in the mousetrap.
But the fatal blow was that California’s tech-friendly Gov. Gavin Newsom just wasn’t on board. The veto pen loomed. “No way was the governor going to sign either of the bills,” said former Assembly Speaker and Sen. Bob Hertzberg, whom Wicks deputized to negotiate a backroom settlement with Google after Meta successfully exited the conversation. “He viewed them as a tax.” I was left in the dark about the negotiations, which made sense when I saw the handshake deal struck with Google. The small public-private partnership that was proposed in lieu of major regulation reopened the labor-management divide in California: rejected by California’s journalist organizations but welcomed by some of the state’s publishers, who shrugged that anything is better than nothing. “When you’re starving, you’ll take crumbs,” one tired-sounding California news executive told me at the time.
California’s journalists are still waiting to be served those crumbs, which have only got more crumblike as newsrooms have gotten hungrier. The handshake deal with Google was reduced further in 2025 as the state’s budget also contracted. Google’s expected first contribution of $10 million is now smaller than what it reported spending on lobbying while opposing the legislation. Meanwhile, California’s newsrooms kept shrinking, and I volunteered to be similarly reduced. I took a buyout from the Times during one of several recent layoffs that have halved the newsroom, resigned my Guild presidency, and moved on to working on journalism legislation for a nonprofit. The good news from life after the newsroom: Right now, coalitions can be built everywhere to drive hundreds of millions of dollars in new public investment in community media. We can really win. I’m an optimist who’s excited about what’s possible with policy. But I don’t get too romantic about politics.
It was Big Tech that killed journalism. It was big corporate media owners whose goals was money, not good journalism.