Going, going, gone.
A high-stakes funding deal between Google and the California government meant to help the struggling local news industry survive has been effectively dismantled by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who eliminated state funding for the program in his proposed 2026-27 budget after helping pave the way for the agreement in the first place.
The five-year deal created the California Civic Media Program, a first-of-its-kind partnership that state leaders billed as a lifeline for local journalism amid a historic collapse of the industry.
California has lost more than 40% of its local newspapers since 2005, according to Northwestern University research.
Newsom celebrated the agreement in 2024, saying it would help “rebuild a robust and dynamic California press corps for years to come” and bolster “the vital role of journalism in our democracy.”
“It seems shockingly short-sighted when it comes to supporting local journalism which by now we know has no commercial future,” said Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “I understand there may be budget shortfalls and there are always thoughtful decisions that need to be made about funding … but local journalism should be a higher priority.”
Newsom’s office referred questions about the decision to the state’s finance department, which said last year’s budget included $10 million for the program, matched by Google. The department did not explain why the new $348.9 billion budget proposal eliminated the funding entirely.
“We have not heard an explanation yet,” said Santa Cruz state Sen. John Laird, who supported the deal. “Admittedly, this is a difficult budget.”
East Bay Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, who helped broker the agreement and called it a “cross-sector commitment to supporting a free and vibrant press,” did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Local news has suffered a long decline since the advent of the internet shifted advertising into the digital realm, where Google and Meta built lucrative business models in large part by hosting links to news stories. Together, the Silicon Valley giants grew to capture half the world’s digital-ads revenue by last year, according to data firm Emarketer.
“The basic problem around the world is that the large tech companies have used quality information from newspapers and other creators and haven’t paid for it,” said Anya Schiffrin, a senior lecturer and global media expert at Columbia University.
The companies have fought measures to make them pay to support news outlets. Canada in 2023 passed a law requiring tech companies to pay to use news content. Meta in response stopped including news links in users’ feeds, while Google agreed to pay about $73 million a year.
In California, lawmakers responded to the local news crisis with a series of efforts that have been killed off or slashed down.
Wicks authored the bipartisan California Journalism Preservation Act, Assembly Bill 866, which passed the Assembly but stalled in the state Senate under heavy lobbying from big tech companies. (Bay Area News Group is a member of the California News Publishers Association, which sponsored the bill.) Former state Sen. Steve Glazer proposed Senate Bill 1327, which would have supported news outlets through a tax on tech companies’ collection of user data.
Technology companies — and some independent news outlets — opposed the measures. The policy coalition Chamber of Progress labeled them a “link-tax-funded news bailout.”
Publishers argued that dominant online platforms, especially those of Google and Meta, use news content and divert ad revenue from news publications, with most searches ending at the results page with answers snipped from online news articles that don’t require clicking through to news websites. When readers click through to publishers’ websites, they said, Google’s control of digital-ads technology means it gets most of that money, too.
Neither AB 866 nor SB 1327 survived. Newsom “indicated he would veto either of our bills if it got to his desk,” Glazer, who is mulling a run for the U.S. Congress, said this week.
Those programs were replaced by the California Civic Media Program, which drew national attention as a compromise between lawmakers and Google.
Although Wicks’ office put out a 2024 press release claiming the deal would “provide nearly $250 million in public and private funding over the next five years,” the terms released by officials indicated a lower amount. California was to pay $30 million the first year and $10 million in each of the next four years into the journalism fund, Wicks’ office said at the time. Google, in the first year, would pay $15 million into the fund and $5 million to an artificial-intelligence accelerator program tacked onto the agreement, and add $10 million to its “existing journalism programs.” In each of the next four years, Google was to pay $10 million into the fund and $10 million into the existing programs.
The deal was a “small remedy” that would do little to “mitigate the precipitous drop in local news reporting,” Glazer said.
But even that remedy proved too costly. Last year Newsom cut proposed state funding for the fund from $30 million to $10 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year. The move came after his office said California faced a $12 billion deficit. Google in turn cut its $15 million commitment for the year to $10 million.
Google said Friday it made its 2025 contributions. But unless state funding for the program is restored, Google won’t contribute this year. “We stand ready to match the state’s contribution to the Civic Media Program and are awaiting the final budget later this year,” a Google spokesperson said.
The $20 million from the state and Google will be distributed to newsrooms this year, a government spokesman said.
Laird said he hoped the legislature would find a way to provide more funding.
“I am hoping there will be discussions in the next few months about the best way to do it,” Laird said.
Rebuilding local news carries even more-critical importance today, when Californians are deluged with misinformation, said Columbia’s Schiffrin.
“We’re not going to be able to combat all the bad and misleading information that’s out there,” Schiffrin said, “unless we have good information.”
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