The WGA East, decrying the “negative impact” the Big Tech giants are having on ad revenue for news organizations, has submitted written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on…
Noting that all news organizations face the challenge of paying for professional journalists while “Big Tech takes the lion’s share of the advertising revenue,” the guild said:
“The tech platforms do not pay writers and correspondents and editors and producers and crews to investigate and report the news. They simply make money by selling ads against the stories that are created by professional journalists who are employed by news organizations.“To be clear, the news is going online, which is where the Big Tech companies take the revenues.
“This is not just a matter of platform. There is nothing inherent in digital technology that would preclude news organizations from obtaining revenue by distributing their stories online. The problem is the concentration of market power by a tiny handful of Big Tech companies. Facebook and Google – and to a lesser extent, at least for now, Twitter and Amazon – have the market power to completely dominate the digital advertising market. News organizations simply cannot compete.
“The result is predictable: Continued consolidation and cutbacks and layoffs in newsrooms across the country. Local newspapers have slashed their newsroom staffs. Local broadcasters often fill their newscasts with stories created by national chains. Even digital-native news organizations, which had been growing enormously, face severe headwinds as ad revenue gets more and more difficult to find.
“Two pillars of American democracy are competitive markets free from domination by a small number of giant firms and a robust, free press,” the guild said. “Both pillars are undermined by Big Tech companies gorging on the digital ad revenues that could, and should, be used to pay professional journalists to investigate and report the news.”
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