Two state laws are in the works that are designed to save journalism.

AB 886 would require Facebook, Google and other Big Tech companies to pay newsrooms for linking to their stories – it’s called Journalism Usage Fee.

We have all seen it. Stories are shared on social media, no one actually clicks on the story to go to the news home page, and instead just read the headline and then comment. And that’s bad for business.

In the latest episode of Santa Barbara Talks, Josh Molina explains the bills, and offers his own solution on ways to save journalism. Click on the YouTube link below to watch the 20-minute video.

Now AI is starting to summarize journalists’ stories, so if you search a topic, instead of it going to the news site, AI will summarize the story in its own box and then people don’t need to read the actual story.

The bill’s language says newspaper advertising has decreased 66%, and newsroom staff have declined 44%, in the past 10 years

There’s another bill designed to help journalism.

SB 1327 would impose a “data extraction mitigation fee” — a sales tax — on technology platforms that reap more than $2.5 billion annually in revenue.

From this bill $500 million would provide tax credits for reporters’ salaries. Schools would also get a cut of the money. The idea is that these tech companies took billions in advertising dollars from newspapers, and then shared the content online for free, and newspapers lost out on the money to pay their employees. 

These seem to be good government solutions worth considering, although Google has indicated that it does not support the proposals.

Already the company has tested not returning links to news pages through Google searches to test whether it impacts their advertising going forward. The big companies contend that sharing these links helps newspapers because it widely distributes their content.

That is if people actually click on the story.

Joshua Molina is journalist who currently writes for Noozhawk and teaches journalism at Santa Barbara City College. He formerly covered politics and land use for the San Jose Mercury News. Santa Barbara Talks is an independently owned podcast where Molina looks to bring together voices from all perspectives to discuss and provide solutions to the challenges related to housing, education, transportation and other community issues. Subscribe to his podcast here and consider a contribution here.