Google and California just announced a $250 million deal to support local journalism. It sounds great on paper, but there are still a lot of questions.
The deal has two main parts: the News Transformation Fund and the National AI Innovation Accelerator. Google is putting in $110 million, and California taxpayers are chipping in $70 million. The rest could come from other private sources.
The LaTimes reports that the News Transformation Fund is supposed to get about $125 million. That’s $55 million from Google and $70 million from California. The plan is to use this money to hire hundreds of new journalists and rebuild local newsrooms.
But is it enough? In Canada, Google is paying around $74 million a year to fund journalism. In California, they’re only committing $15 million in the first year and $10 million each year after that. Some researchers say Google actually owes U.S. publishers between $10 billion and $12 billion every year.
Then there’s the National AI Innovation Accelerator. Google is putting $70 million into this over five years. The idea is to help organizations in fields like journalism, environment, and racial equity experiment with AI tools. But there are worries that these AI tools could eventually replace human journalists.
The deal also sidesteps some proposed laws that could have forced tech companies to pay publishers continuously for linking to their articles. By shelving these bills, California missed a chance to make tech giants pay up in the long run.
So while the deal provides some much-needed funding for local newsrooms, it might not be enough to ensure their long-term survival. And with the focus on AI, there are concerns about the future role of human journalists.
“The deal not only provides funding to support hundreds of new journalists but helps rebuild a robust and dynamic California press corps for years to come, reinforcing the vital role of journalism in our democracy,” Newsom said in a statement as reported by Techcrunch. CNPA called the agreement “a first step toward what we hope will become a comprehensive program to sustain local news in the long term.”
The money will be managed by UC Berkeley’s journalism school, but there are still a lot of details to work out. The state legislature needs to approve California’s share of the funding, and there’s no guarantee that Google will follow through on its full $55 million commitment.
In the end, this deal leaves us with more questions than answers about the future of local journalism in California and beyond. Will it be enough to save struggling newsrooms? Will AI tools help or hurt journalists? Only time will tell.
