Berkeleyside’s Idea Makers dives into a critical questions about future of local journalism

From left, Nico Savidge, Soleil Ho, Lisa Armstrong and Lance Knobel discuss journalism’s current challenges at Idea Makers on Dec. 5, 2024. Credit: Kelly Sullivan

Grappling with the return of a U.S. president disdainful of reporters and the decline of newspapers in California and across the country, Berkeleyside’s Dec. 5 Idea Makers panel was billed as a discussion of “journalism at a crossroads.”

The headliner for the panel was state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who talked about efforts in Sacramento to get tech giants to pay for the news content they use in order to fund newsrooms in California. Wicks represents Berkeley as well as Richmond and parts of Oakland — where Berkeleyside sister newsrooms Richmonside and The Oaklandside operate — along with other parts of Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

Watch Berkeleyside’s full Dec. 5 Idea Makers panel.

Cityside CEO and Berkeleyside co-founder Lance Knobel moderated the program last Thursday, including the first half with Wicks that focused on a funding battle that played out in Sacramento recently, and the second half with UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism professor and Cityside board member Lisa Armstong, San Francisco Chronicle columnist and critic Soleil Ho and Berkeleyside Associate Editor Nico Savidge.

Around 100 people attended the event, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s Barbro Osher Theater on Center Street.

District 14 State Representative Buffy Wicks speaks with Cityside co-founder Lance Knobel onstage at BAMPFA’s Osher Theater on Dec. 5, 2024. Credit: Kelly Sullivan

Between 2005 and 2022, California lost more than two thirds — 68% — of its working newspaper journalists, along with a third of its newspapers, according to a 2023 nationwide study by the Northwestern Medill School of Journalism. News startups, particularly digital and nonprofit ones, have had some small successes in slowing the bleeding, according to the study.

In 2023, Wicks authored an Assembly bill to compel tech giants like Google to pay fees to, or negotiate with, news outlets in California to use the outlet’s content. This year, a state Senate bill also sought to get the big tech platforms to pay for local journalism. The News Media Alliance, an industry lobbying body, argues that Google alone should be paying publishers in excess of $10 billion a year nationally.

But Google waged an $11 million lobbying blitz and threatened to end Google News Initiative (GNI) programs in California. (Cityside, Berkeleyside’s nonprofit parent organization, has received funding from GNI.) Although Wicks’ bill easily passed in the Assembly and seemed set for success in the Senate, lawmakers and Google in August agreed on a five-year, $250 million deal in which both Google and the state will pay into a News Transformation Fund to help fund newsrooms in California. Cityside’s Knobel had testified to the Senate about both the Assembly and Senate bills and, following the agreed deal, supported the compromise. 

While labor unions and some publishers have criticized the arrangement as settling for too little, Wicks said at the Berkeleyside panel that part of the impetus for the deal was looking at how Meta — Facebook and Instagram’s parent company — simply pulled news content from its platforms in Canada after a law was passed ordering tech companies to pay publishers. 

“There was sort of the art of [the] possible in politics in Sacramento this year,” Wicks said, arguing it was unlikely Gov. Gavin Newsom would have signed the bill if it had emerged from the senate. We “required [Google] not to pull out of any of their pre-existing relationships. And Meta is not going to pull out of California now.” Many of the details of the August deal remain to be resolved, but Wicks said she expected payments could be made out of the fund in 2025. 

The guests in the second panel discussed the perils of a second Donald Trump presidency to the news industry, how reporters can build trust with audiences in a fractured media landscape rife with misinformation and what hope, if any, is left for the news.

“I worry about those independent newsrooms that don’t have giant legal war chests. … It appears this incoming administration is sending signals that they will indeed exercise as much power as they can to get news that they do not like out of the picture,” Ho said. “You have to retain really expensive legal counsel to fight that. A smaller newspaper, or even just a newsletter or a news organization, they don’t necessarily have those resources.”

The shrinking landscape of local news organizations, Armstrong said, was draining public trust in media outlets as a whole. Armstrong mentioned that she first learned that President Joe Biden had announced he was dropping his bid for reelection on Instagram and her first instinct was to question whether the letter announcing it was even real.

The audience welcomes panelists at Berkeleyside’s Idea Makers panel on Dec. 5, 2024. Credit: Kelly Sullivan

That incident, she said, was an example of how “we can’t just keep producing news and expecting people to come to us.” She said newsrooms need to be embedded in the communities they serve.

“If you go and you do one story, and then you leave, then there’s no trust,” Armstrong said. “You came, you extracted the story and then you went on your way. But if I see you all the time and you’re here not just when things are bad … you’re seeing us as a whole community that has things that are good and that are bad, but you’re invested, then there’s trust, and I want to learn from you.”