Pioneering Payback

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Recently, John Maher—the president of The Oregonian and OregonLive, one of the largest publishers in the state—noticed something different about Google search results. So he decided to run a test. He entered a reference to an article published by his newsroom: “Washington county sewer district Hawaii clean water services.” What came up was an AI-generated summary of the story, along with summaries of articles that quoted or highlighted its reporting. The results meant that no one would have a reason to click through. “It gets to the heart of what’s happening on a macro scale—how our content is being assimilated into AI summaries,” Maher told me. In April, he described his experiment to the state senate, as part of testimony in support of a bill called the Oregon Journalism Protection Act.

If passed, it would be the first law of its kind in the United States, forcing Big Tech to compensate press organizations in Oregon for a portion of the value that news generates on major platforms. Khanh Pham, a state senator and the bill’s primary sponsor, drafted the legislation based on other efforts to compensate journalists—in Australia and Canada, where such laws have gone into effect, and in California and New Jersey, which have made similar attempts—and with input from a coalition that included Oregon Public Broadcasting, the Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism, the Oregon Association of Broadcasters, the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists. If all goes to plan, Big Tech companies, defined by revenue and reach, would be required either to pay a set total sum or to enter arbitration with Oregon’s publishers to settle on payouts. The total amount owed, as of now, is set at $122 million annually: $104 million from Google and $18 million from Meta. (That calculation is based on Oregon’s GDP as a proportion of the $12.9 billion in annual value that a 2023 study found news content generates for those companies in the US.) Individual newsrooms would receive payouts based on the number of journalists they employ.

The bill differs from other initiatives for its consideration of local and independent outlets. Ninety percent of the money would go to journalism operations in Oregon with at least a hundred thousand dollars in revenue, a majority of which is generated by editorial content, but 10 percent—a significant carve-out—would support a civic information consortium tasked with providing grants to rural operations and startups. That could deliver as much as twelve million dollars to local news. The board of the consortium would be managed by the University of Oregon and modeled after the Civic Information Consortium in New Jersey. “When newsrooms close, Oregonians lose,” Pham said. “We must act now.”

Oregon’s news ecosystem has had a tough decade. In March, the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon released a report revealing that, since 2022, nearly twenty local news outlets statewide had closed or merged and, “even where news remains, the output is thin.” Out-of-state companies now own roughly 50 percent of Oregon’s newspapers, and have been known to cut staff post-acquisition. The proliferation of AI-generated content, meanwhile, has created an opportunity for “zombie” sites, operating under the titles of defunct local outlets, to publish plagiarized, jumbled stories, sometimes under the names of real, unsuspecting journalists who live far from Oregon.

The bill has faced opposition. Some publishers have voiced concerns about potential long delays and significant expense caused by extended arbitration with Big Tech, the cost of which would come out of their awards. “By the time the litigation resolves,” Chuck Corra, the associate director of policy and advocacy at an industry group called Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, wrote in a testimony, newsrooms “could very well be out of business.” Google and Meta, to no one’s surprise, have also come out against the legislation. In written testimony, Meta claimed that the bill was based on “a false premise,” since news outlets post on its platforms voluntarily, and threatened a ban on news in Oregon akin to the one imposed in Canada. (The brunt of that impact was borne by small French- or Indigenous-language outlets and remote community-focused publications that relied heavily on Facebook to disseminate their coverage.)

But in Maher’s view, the consequences of losing news on Meta are overblown and outdated. “In many cases, that traffic never comes through anyway,” he said. In his testimony, he described the risk of a “link tax” as “cynical spin by large platforms” that ignores the real impact of Big Tech, including that of generative AI.

Besides, if Meta were to ban news, “that would just be ammunition for me,” Branden Andersen—the founder and sole proprietor of Newsberg, a two-year-old hyperlocal digital news outlet serving Newberg, a town of nearly thirty thousand just outside Portland—told me. “I’d be able to tell my community, ‘Meta doesn’t want this level of discourse on their platform anymore.’”

Andersen is hopeful that the bill can deliver resources to support his work. Still, as a one-person newsroom, he would qualify only for grants awarded through the consortium, and he worries that, as written, the legislation could allow a disproportionate amount of the money to flow out of state—to Carpenter Media Group, Sinclair, and the Advance media empire, which owns The Oregonian. The bill requires newsrooms to primarily serve an Oregonian audience, but there is no requirement for local ownership; The Oregonian and Oregon Public Broadcasting would be eligible for the largest shares of the awards. In testimony, Andersen called for amendments to the bill that would ensure money goes to Oregon journalists. “For me, the huge sticking point is the idea of funding large conglomerates that, in many ways, gutted our local media landscape,” he said. “If we could prioritize and write local ownership into this, I think it would go a long way.”

The bill is expected to go to a vote on the Oregon senate floor in the coming weeks. Oregon’s Republican minority issued proposed amendments that would shift the funding from Big Tech to taxpayers, using tax credits for subscriptions and nonprofit donations. Matt Pearce—the director of policy at Rebuild Local News, a national nonprofit—told me that he was encouraged by the bipartisan energy to save news, notably the GOP’s embrace of public subsidies. “You need bipartisanship for any of this to be durable,” he said. “It can’t be a partisan issue to say that communities need community information.”

Even so, “there are many rivers to cross before this bill becomes law,” Doyle Canning, Pham’s senior policy adviser, said. The bill has passed its committee vote and is now headed to the floor, then over to the Oregon House of Representatives—controlled by Democrats—where, she said, it will likely see more amendments. “We’re working fast and furiously to keep it moving—and we’re optimistic.” Oregon’s legislature adjourns June 29.

“I have no idea which way the winds are going to blow, because there’s a lot of opposition,” Andersen told me. “But the Oregon news media landscape is growing, and we are working together. If nothing else, that’s been a very positive output from all of this. All the publishers, reporters, and editors have come together and said, ‘We feel this is important. Our communities tell us it is important. Now we need to make sure that we’re able to sustain ourselves for the long term.’”

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