California Announces Deal with Tech Companies to Fund Journalism and AI Research

The state of California and tech companies have entered into an agreement under which the state and tech companies would collectively pay $250 million over five years to support California-based news organizations and create an AI research program.

Democratic Assembly member Buffy Wicks, the deal negotiator, said that the initiative will commence in 2025, with $100 million in the first year, and most of the money will go to news organizations.

However, in return, lawmakers would “shelve legislation that would have required Google to pay news outlets for distributing their content,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

“This agreement represents a major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California—leveraging substantial tech industry resources without imposing new taxes on Californians,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “The deal not only provides funding to support hundreds of new journalists but also helps rebuild a robust and dynamic California press corps for years to come, reinforcing the vital role of journalism in our democracy.”

With this deal, the prolonged fight between tech giants and lawmakers over Wicks’ proposed bill to require companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft to pay a certain percentage of advertising revenue to news-media companies for linking to their reporting comes to an end.

“This partnership represents a cross-sector commitment to supporting a free and vibrant press, empowering local news outlets up and down the state to continue in their essential work,” Wicks said in a statement. “This is just the beginning.”

Notably, the California News Publishers Association, representing more than 700 news organizations, supports the agreement along with Google’s corporate parent Alphabet and OpenAI.

On the contrary, numerous journalists, including those in the Media Guild of the West, slammed the deal and said it would hurt California news organizations.

The Los Angeles Times quoted Matt Pearce, president of the Media Guild of the West, as calling the deal “a total rout of the state’s attempts to check Google’s stranglehold over our newsrooms.”

State Sen. Steve Glazer, who authored a bill to provide news organizations with a tax credit for hiring full-time journalists, said the agreement “seriously undercuts our work toward a long-term solution to rescue independent journalism.”