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Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, shown here with the late Hal Greenwood, is teaming up with other senators to try to pass the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill that would give news outlets the ability to collectively negotiate for fair compensation with companies like Google and Facebook. Staff Photo Brian Larsen
This was edited for length
On February 2, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar held a senate Judiciary Subcommittee meeting on the Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights hearing on journalism, competition and the effects of market power on the free press.
Senator Klobuchar was the Chairwoman of the Subcommittee.
“We’re here today to talk about how we’ll give these news outlets a fighting chance. I’ve teamed up with my colleague Senator Kennedy to lead the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. Our bill gives local news outlets the ability to collectively negotiate for fair compensation with companies like Google and Facebook so they can continue to invest in the kind of quality reporting that keeps us all informed,” said the Senator.
“These big tech companies are not friends to journalism. They are raking in ad dollars while taking news content, feeding it to their users, and refusing to offer fair compensation,” Klobuchar said. “What does big tech’s dominance over the news mean for Americans? Less revenue for local news, fewer journalists to do in-depth high-quality reporting, more exposure to misinformation, and fewer reliable sources…That’s why we need to step in to level the playing field.”
Last March, Klobuchar, Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), Representative David Cicilline (D-RI), and Representative Ken Buck (R-NY) introduced bipartisan, bicameral legislation to level the negotiating playing field by allowing news publishers and broadcasters to band together to negotiate with digital platforms on the terms on which their news content can be accessed. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would enable news organizations to negotiate terms that would provide fair compensation for news content, while protecting and preserving Americans’ right to access quality news.
Senator Klobuchar’s father, Jim, was a reporter, columnist in the Twin Cities. During the hearing Senator Klobuchar said, “So some of you may know, my dad was a newspaperman as a reporter and a columnist in the Twin Cities. He covered it all in an estimated 8,400 columns and about 12 million words in which he interviewed everyone from Ronald Reagan, Senator Lee, to Ginger Rogers, to Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka. I won’t say which interview was his favorite. He was proud to be a newspaperman. And as you can imagine, in my house growing up it was impossible to forget the importance of a free press and that is what we are here to talk about today, to talk about the critical work news outlets around the country are doing and explore solutions to some of the existential challenges facing journalism.”
How much have newspapers suffered in the first part of the 21st century?
Newspaper revenue fell from over $37 billion in 2008 to less than $9 billion in 2020. And according to the Pointer Institute, roughly 1,800 papers have closed since 2004.
“What else happened during that time? questioned the Senator. “Well, if you see the ad revenues for the world’s biggest companies, you’ll see the exact opposite story being told. Facebook and Google, worth over $2.6 trillion dollars combined as I speak, became digital advertising titans during that same time. Just yesterday, Google reported $61 billion in advertising revenue in a single 3-month period – a 33 percent jump. I say to my colleagues, a 33 percent jump from the same period just last year. Look at those numbers, $61 billion in just three months for one company. $61 billion and you have U.S. newspaper revenue from 2008 to 2020 going from $37 billion to $9 billion. As one of my colleagues said during the presidential race, do the math. It’s not that hard to figure it out. Do the math.”
One of the big problems, as Senator Klobuchar sees it, is, “These big tech companies are not friends to journalism. They are raking in ad dollars while taking news content, feeding it to their users, and refusing to offer fair compensation. And they’re making money on consumers’ backs by using the content produced by news outlets to suck up as much data about each reader as they can. So, it’s kind of a double whammy, right? They’re the big guys, they’re bringing in the content, they’re not compensating for it as they should. And at the same time, they are getting the revenue off the consumers that read the content that then don’t go to the ones that are producing the content. So then that data really exacerbates what is already a huge divide in where that revenue goes.
“And what does big tech’s dominance over the news mean for Americans? As I’ve already noted, less revenue for local news, fewer journalists to do in-depth high-quality reporting, more exposure to misinformation, and fewer reliable sources. While the rise of these platforms has sometimes meant a larger audience for some news outlets, that hasn’t translated to increased ad revenue. For years, I’ve heard concerns about things like the platforms do not provide adequate branding for news outlets’ original content on the platforms. That they hoard for themselves all of the data on the users that access the news content produced by news providers through their platform. That they publish large snippets of newspapers’ content to attract users to the platform without any compensation at all to that news outlet. And repeated complaints to Google and Facebook from newspapers and broadcasters are simply ignored. Because that’s what a monopolist does. They can ignore things. They can use their market dominance to elbow others out and retain their control. That‘s why we need to step in to level the playing field, as so many other countries are doing.
I’ve teamed up with my colleague Senator Kennedy to lead the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. Our bill gives local news outlets the ability to collectively negotiate for fair compensation with companies like Google and Facebook so they can continue to invest in the kind of quality reporting that keeps us all informed. And we’re working with our bipartisan partners in the House of Representatives on improvements to the bill. We’re ready to take all ideas and address all challenges raised by our colleagues because we believe there’s a way to do this fairly to make sure that all news outlets are included to better the bargaining imbalance between newspapers and big tech. We’re looking at this clear framework for good faith negotiations between news organizations and big tech, mechanisms to help those negotiations go smoothly, protections to prevent discrimination against news outlets based on the political views that they express, and provisions to better ensure that the interests of small independent news outlets are paramount in any joint negotiation.
“I also introduced the Future of Local News Act to help local news outlets chart the path forward as they recover from the pandemic. And I’m working with my colleagues to pass the Local Journalism Sustainability Act to help Americans pay for newspaper subscriptions.
“So, all this said, if we were living in a perfect world where we didn’t have monopoly search engines and monopoly platforms with, some cases, over 90 percent of the market, and we were able to pass some of the bills that I have, and my colleagues have on a bipartisan basis, Senator Grassley, to even that playing field, maybe we wouldn’t be where we are. But we are here because we have a crisis going on when we’ve lost over 2,000 news outlets. And that is why we have come upon this targeted approach to protect the First Amendment, to protect the news organizations that we believe are so critical to making sure that the First Amendment stays strong.”
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