Suddenly California Now Loves The Press. 3 Years Ago They Hurt It

Will the real California Assembly please stand up!

In the space of just a few years, California’s Democrat-heavy lawmakers have switched from introducing measures that hurt journalism and journalists to now wanting to help them.

The latest law, which passed overwhelmingly on June 2, is the “Journalism Preservation Act” also known as AB 886.

The Sacramento Bee explains the rules and the intent of the law, like so:

• “AB 886 would require social media companies such as Meta, Google, Twitter and others to pay a percentage of their advertising revenue — to be determined by arbitration — as a “journalism usage fee” to news organizations producing content that is shared on their platforms. Those news organizations would be required to spend 70% of those funds on journalists and support staff.”

In other words, Meta (ticker: META) and the rest would be required to stump up some cash to help support California’s ailing news organizations.

California’s Flip Floppers

However, it wasn’t that long ago that California’s Assembly brought forth and passed a bill that among other occupations targeted freelance journalists.

It was known as AB5 and restricted such freelance writers to authoring no more than 35 articles a year. That rule took no account of how long each article might be or the amount of money that the gig worker might get paid.

I know plenty of writers who pump out 35 stories a month. Those folks wouldn get to work one month a year, and the rest of the time no

(Notably the law didn’t include book authors, which I suspect is something to do with the fact that politicians often get financially generous book deals. And yes, writing a book is almost always a freelance gig.)

Most news organizations routinely use some freelance writers and have done so in one way or another since newspapers and pamphlets began in the 1400s. Yet, California’s left-leaning state assembly didn’t seem to care too much about what the new law did to journalists trying to squeeze out a living. It was bad.

Nevertheless that portion if AB5 was overturned in September 2020. Put another way, after inflicting nine months of pain of people who write for a living, the governor decided the law was wrong.

Still, this whole thing begs the question of what the new law, AB 886 will do for journalism and the media in general? What unseen consequences will there be for publications like The New York Times
NYT
, the La Times, or the Wall Street Journal?

It should seem clear that Meta and the other social media giants have enough cash to fight the new law in the courts. They could also decide to no bother posting any stories for readers in California, effectively shutting out part of the news audience.

Who knows what will happen, but given the fall out from AB5, which was wholly due to poor drafting in the assembly, one wonders exactly what nastiness AB886 will unleash on journalism.