Google reaches a $250 million deal to skirt proposed journalism bill

Google’s new deal with California lawmakers will pay newsrooms across the state up to $250 million over the next five years, while also helping the tech giant avoid an even bigger bill. The first-in-the-nation agreement, funded by taxpayers, Google, and potentially other private sources, allows the search giant to evade a proposed state bill that would force it to pay for linking Californians to news articles.

The money will be split between two initiatives administered by the “News Transformation Fund” at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. According to Politico, $180 million is set for distribution to Californian news outlets (excluding broadcasters), while the remaining $70 million is earmarked for artificial intelligence resources to help “strengthen the workforce.” The initiatives are expected to go live sometime in 2025.

“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,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. The California News Publishers Association also praised the agreement, calling it “a first step toward what we hope will become a comprehensive program to sustain local news in the long term.”

The agreement follows a two-year battle between tech giants and the news industry regarding how local journalism should be supported amid a shift toward online readership and a decline in advertising. The California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) was a proposed solution, with one study estimating that Meta and Google would annually owe US publishers up to $13.9 billion if the bill passed. Google responded by running tests to remove links to California news websites, saying the CJPA “may result in significant changes” to its product experience.

The five-year agreement now set to supersede it has attracted criticism from lawmakers and journalists. California state Senate leader Mike McGuire raised funding concerns in a statement to Politico, saying the deal “doesn’t fully address the inequities facing the industry,”

“The publishers who claim to represent our industry are celebrating an opaque deal involving taxpayer funds, a vague AI accelerator project that could very well destroy journalism jobs, and minimal financial commitments from Google to return the wealth this monopoly has stolen from our newsrooms,” the Media Guild of the West said in its own statement. “Not a single organization representing journalists and news workers agreed to this undemocratic and secretive deal with one of the businesses destroying our industry.”