The president of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild testified in support of a bill advancing in Oregon that would require Big Tech platforms to compensate Oregon newsrooms for local content.
Mai Hoang, the president of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, a local of The NewsGuild-CWA, testified in the Oregon State Senate Committee on Rules last week in support of Senate Bill 686, which would level the playing field and make sure large companies like Meta and Alphabet would have to pay for news appearing on their apps and websites such as Facebook, Instagram and Google.
“Working journalists provide the content, including stories, photography and video, that Oregonians find on Google and other digital platforms,” Hoang said at the hearing. “When there are fewer journalists, there’s less reliable information that Oregonians can access.”
The Oregon Journalism Protection Act was introduced by State Senator Khanh Pham and now advances to a markup committee before a final vote on the Oregon Senate floor.
“It speaks volumes that these gigantic digital platforms are responding to this bill and others proposed in other states by threatening to censor and take away news content from their sites and depriving their users of valuable and vetted information,” Hoang said. “They call it a business decision – I call it a refusal to properly pay the news outlets – and the journalists who work for them.”
The bill is supported by Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Oregon Society of Professional Journalists, News/Media Alliance, Rebuild Local News, and University of Oregon’s Agora Journalism Center.
The Oregon legislation mirrors other efforts happening in states and nationwide, including the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. The NewsGuild-CWA will only support those legislative efforts if there’s a requirement that 70% of new revenue will be used by news organizations to support newsroom jobs.
The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild is Local 37082 of The NewsGuild-CWA. They represent more than 400 workers at 18 media workplaces in Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Idaho.