At White House meeting, Trib CEO urges support of bill to save local news
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Trib Total Media President and CEO Jennifer Bertetto met Wednesday with White House officials to advocate for legislation that would allow local news outlets to negotiate for fair compensation from large digital platforms that use their content.
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would allow news publishers to collectively negotiate with digital platforms such as Google and Facebook.
In testimony last year before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, Bertetto said the bill would ensure the survival of news outlets that provide information for small communities that may otherwise be overlooked.
“Big Tech companies don’t have reporters on the ground like we do,” Bertetto said. “Yet they get the bulk of the revenue while we are the ones providing quality journalism to communities from Greensburg to Tarentum. It is only fair that publishers like the Trib can sit down and negotiate for adequate compensation.”
Bertetto said she remains hopeful that support for the legislation will continue to grow.
“We know the support is there,” she said. “There is no doubt that people believe the press should continue informing citizens and keeping in check those in positions of power. No one wants that to change.”
Bertetto met Wednesday with staff from the National Economic Council, which was established in 1993 to advise the president on domestic and global economic policy. She joined representatives from other media outlets to advocate for the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act before Hannah Garden-Monheit, special assistant to the president for economic policy, and Rachel Brown, senior policy advisor.
The meeting is part of the News/Media Alliance Support Journalism Parade in Washington D.C., which aimed to bolster support for the legislation.
According to the News/Media Alliance, between 16% and 40% of Google search results are news content, but tech companies like Google don’t fairly pay news outlets for that content. The alliance said that has contributed to a 58% revenue decrease among U.S. newspapers since 2005.
Big Tech platforms take as much as 70% of the revenue from digital advertising, the News/Media Alliance said, leaving publishers with just 30%.
U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and John Kennedy, R-La, reintroduced the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act in the Senate in March. In the last Congressional session, the bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee with a bipartisan vote of 15-7.