It’s no secret that the decades-long deterioration of the local journalism business model is tightly knitted to the burgeoning evolution of Big Tech search and social media platforms.
Several organizations are defending journalism’s role in the U.S. democracy. The Center for Journalism Liberty, a division of the Open Markets Institute (OMI), is doing so by closely watching how Big Tech is breaching antitrust principles and creating an unfair atmosphere for news publishers.
The Center is picking through the thorny issues while also recommending policy.
“The Open Markets Institute is essentially a political economy think tank that focuses on how to use competition policy and fight monopolies to build stronger democracies and more equitable societies, more innovative economies,” said Courtney Radsch, director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty. The Center “is particularly focused on journalism to ensure and figure out what do sustainable business models for independent, privately funded advertising-funded journalism look like. More broadly, it ensures independence through neutrality and the role that internet intermediaries, technology platforms, and now, AI play in the information ecosystem.”
Newspapers are often scraping the bottom of the barrel for digital advertising. Google has long been able to offer even local advertisers digital reach for far less than newspapers would have to charge. Then, social media companies followed suit with new ways to slice and dice audiences. Now, artificial intelligence companies are creating new threats of many types.
That’s more than a mountain to climb. The industry is trying to survive a volcano of disruption.
Content monetization is changing by the hour, and many Big Tech companies have driven enormous revenue from journalism while undercutting local media companies’ ability to compete for advertising dollars.
To Radsch and publishers worldwide, it’s not a fair fight. Radsch argues that the playing field needs adjustments. The public deserves a chance to have a say in how information is delivered and consumed. To that end, the Center for Journalism and Liberty is constantly busy producing research and designing policy solutions.
‘So first we do research,” Radsch said. “We are researching the facts on the ground — empirical research and journalistic research. Then, we do analysis that we publish in a variety of ways. We aim to help the media and policymaker communities better understand the issues, ask better questions and identify the correct problems.
“We’re trying to reframe how the press and policymakers understand some of these problems and suggest solutions, either through policies or regulations. … We’re not lobbying in general. There are groups that lobby, but that’s not our focus. We are journalists, academics and lawyers.”
Currently, among those roles, the Center is tracking antitrust trials involving Google.
“Google Search monopoly controls how people find and access information, and the ad tech monopoly influences how that information is curated, subsidized and funded,” Radsch explained. “The interest that we have in the ad tech case is focused on the fact that Google has a monopoly on the entire ad tech ecosystem — both the supply and demand side — as well as the actual exchange. They can control all of the data. They can constrain the choice sets that both publishers and advertisers have in how they reach each other and the prices they set. We know that they have siphoned off an undue amount of revenue from that exchange, and they have essentially turned publishers into indentured servants and forced advertisers to use their services to connect with publishers, all while creating a system that actually funds and incentivizes disinformation because of the lack of controls over information quality and the lack of transparency.
“The Google search case is just as important, if not more important, than the ad tech case. If you look at the remedies that the Department of Justice (DOJ) proposed in the search case, and if you look at the closing arguments that the DOJ made in the ad tech case, they recognize how these systems are intertwined, how Google monopolizes all of these markets that are part of our information ecosystem. As a result, they control and manipulate the information we see, how publishers reach audiences or not, and how they can monetize outreach. They’ve created a system that prompts surveillance capitalism where anything and everything that we create in the form of data, our interactions, our behaviors, our friends, our networks, our innermost thoughts that we express through search and other things are up for the taking — to monetize, sell to the advertiser, and let them target and manipulate us.”
As the Center for Journalism and Liberty reported, the DOJ issued a “robust” set of proposals by forcing Google to divest its Chrome browser. The court said Google should not be allowed to pay other tech firms, including mobile carriers, for “default distribution.” The Center’s website also reported that Google “faced no meaningful competition from other search engines.” Google plans to appeal the rulings.
Karina Montoya, senior reporter and policy analyst, is covering the trials. She arrived at the OMI Center for Journalism and Liberty three years ago after completing her Master’s degree at Columbia University. She had previous experience covering business and economics in South America.
“It’s research and reporting and talking to publishers, niche publications, and also large publishers and understanding what they’re doing to adapt to the digital transformation that’s never-ending at this point,” Montoya said. “It’s also understanding the policies that can help us level the playing field, which is the expression that we use in terms of how we want to distribute and monetize our content as an industry.”
Montoya reported that another DOJ case against Apple and lawsuits targeting Meta and Amazon are on the horizon.
The recent history of journalism’s conflicts with all the tech giants is complicated. Radsch explained that the goalposts kept moving, which should provide some lessons as the world enters the age of AI.
“The absence of public policy to regulate those platforms, to regulate and create a national privacy law; the failure of Congress to put in place basic protections of personal data much less any other kind of data … they are not bound by the same laws that everyone else is. Not only are they not bound by those laws, whether we’re talking about copyright — which we’re certainly seeing now with AI for intermediary liability — they’re actually given special protections and extra favors. … And now, with AI, it’s even worse because these same companies that have claimed the right to use our intellectual property and creative endeavors for their own gain, without any licensing, without any compensation and without any credit, want to build AI systems that they claim are going to be very beneficial. But so far, the evidence is that there are a lot of safety issues and harmful impacts of how they're going to be rolled out.”
As publishers approach the AI era, she recommends three strategies for working collaboratively across not just the news publishing industry, but also the music and entertainment industry.
The three strategies are:
Radsch said the industry needs digital management collectives, like the music industry, that benefit publishers and the journalists who produce the journalism. Publishers should be willing to join class action lawsuits if AI platforms try to take their content. However, they first need to update their terms of service to prohibit the unlicensed, uncompensated crawling of AI bots and then translate that into readable code on the back end.
“The third is legislate, and we need policymakers to step up and do their job. They need to clarify that it is not fair use to strip mine the internet by a handful of the wealthiest companies in the world to further line their pockets. It is not fair use, and it is not transformative, and it is replacing the market for journalism and many other forms of content and creative endeavors.
Radsch concluded, “I would just say, as we are entering an era of turmoil and as we enter the AI era, I think publishers must figure out how to double down on the humans in journalism and make sure that the structures that are going to be created are designed to support and benefit the humans — the journalists and editors — that are needed to run a news organization.”
Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.
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