Joanne Lipman

Opinion contributors

Over the past decade, the news business has endured a bloodbath, with tens of thousands of journalists losing their jobs amid mass layoffs.

The irony is, more people than ever are consuming news. There’s never been a greater need for factual reporting, from the White House down to the local school board.

Why the disconnect? Look no further than a new study by the News Media Alliance, which found that in 2018, Google made $4.7 billion off of news content — almost as much as every news organization in America combined made from digital ads last year. Yet Google paid a grand total of zero for the privilege. News industry revenue, meanwhile, has plunged.

Google and others, including a number of journalists, dispute the calculation by the News Media Alliance, which represents 2,000 publishers of primarily local newspapers. But the fact remains: Google and Facebook command about 60% of all U.S. digital advertising revenue, and have siphoned off billions of dollars that once were the lifeblood of the news media.

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Tech behemoths are robbing the news media

Let’s be perfectly clear: Journalism’s primary revenue source has been hijacked. It’s time that news providers are compensated for the journalism they produce. That’s why passage of the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is crucial. Congressional hearings begin Tuesday on the proposed legislation, which would allow a four-year antitrust exemption for news organizations so that they can bargain with the digital platforms to create a revenue-sharing model.

I typically would argue that such exemptions are anticompetitive. But the truth is, nothing has been more anticompetitive for the news business in recent years than the digital platforms.

News organizations have been at the beck and call of these behemoths, to no avail. As a longtime news executive, I have been in the room too many times to count with Google, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and others as they have lectured us on exactly what we need to do to save our business. Virtually always, it's to bend our news practices — at our own expense — to their latest algorithm or experimental venture. Pivot to video! Make Snap stories, but only if you prove to us you’ve hired a dedicated team! Change the way you write headlines! Hand over subscription signups to us!

Implicit in every conversation is a threat: If you don’t follow our “suggestions,” you’ll suffer the financial consequences. It will hurt.

News organizations have had virtually no leverage in these discussions, while in the meantime, digital outlets have benefited not only from the news we provide, and from the contortions we bend ourselves into to appease them, but from the data they scrape from our own readers, which they often don’t share with us.

The results are clear: Almost 30,000 newspaper jobs disappeared — a 60% industrywide decline — from 1990 to 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. News media ad revenue plunged by $30 billion between 2006 and 2017, according to a Pew Research Center report. Almost 20% of all newspapers have closed in the past 15 years, and “countless others have become shells — or ‘ghosts’ — of themselves,” according to the University of North Carolina.

Critics protest that the news industry has been too slow to adopt new business models, and there is certainly some truth to that. When I was a cub reporter at the Wall Street Journal, advertising executives flew around the country on a company plane. In the 1990s, the newspaper was so thick with ads that readers used to call to complain it was too heavy to carry.

But those who say the industry has been too slow to pivot in recent years are just plain wrong. Our industry has been singularly focused on digital transformation and new business models. On the financial side, as noted by the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy, of which I was a member, new models include non-profits like ProPublica; for-profit community news organizations; venture philanthropy; and public benefit corporations. Meanwhile, newsrooms, including those of the USA TODAY Network, have created new ways of storytelling and new products using video, audio, virtual reality, augmented reality, drones and more. News organizations have pursued licensing deals for content, moved into television and streaming services, and forged other partnerships to expand content and audience.

Journalism is a profession, not an industry

Yet as long as the digital platforms suck the financial benefits from our work, none of it will “save” journalism. I was reminded of that last week, when I gave a talk about media coverage of the 2020 presidential race at, of all places, Google's New York City office. Afterward, an audience member asked why journalists use the phrase “news industry,” noting that years ago they didn’t refer to their work as part of an industrial process. He asked why we don't instead use the phrase “news profession” – a nod to the mission, not the balance sheet.

His point is well taken. When I started as a journalist, there was a solid wall between reporters and the “business side,” allowing us to focus relentlessly on our jobs, on news coverage, rather than on the business model. Today, journalists have no choice but to spend their days combating, worrying about or suffering the consequences of the financial Armageddon that has whipsawed our profession at the hands of our digital overlords.

That’s why Congress must pass the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. It is in the interest of all of us who believe in a fair and unfettered press, no matter what your political affiliation, to ensure that the media survives financially. Let’s get to that essential place where the industry is secure and sustainable so that journalists can focus all of our attention and energy where it belongs: on our mission, as news professionals.

Joanne Lipman, a former editor in chief of USA TODAY and chief content officer of Gannett, is the author of That's What She Said: What Men and Women Need to Know About Working Together. Follow her on Twitter: @joannelipman.