A two-hour hearing yesterday represented two sides of the debate over the impact of Big Tech – and “Big News” – on journalism and local news reporting.

The US Senate subcommittee on competition policy, antitrust and consumer rights has just finished session to background the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA) or ‘Safe Harbor Bill’.

The legislation – which would allow publishers to negotiate as a group with companies such as Google and Facebook – was reintroduced in the Senate last March, while a similar bill was introduced in the House of representatives.

Yesterday afternoon (earlier this morning, Australian time), subcommittee chair Amy Klobuchar and members quizzed a range of witnesses including Trib Total Media president and chief executive Jennifer Bertetto, general manager of WTOP News Joel Oxley, and economist Hal Singer, the author of a report on behalf of America’s News Media Alliance.

Klobuchar’s heart is in the legislation – her father having been a newspaperman she credited with 12 million words – and in opening, she stressed the importance of “truly local news”.

Newspapers were cutting back, not for lack of talent, but for lack of revenue, which had fallen from US$37 billion in 2008 to less than US$9 billion in 2020, she said. “At the same time, the ad revenues of ‘digital titans’ Facebook and Google moved in the exact opposite direction, Google just having reported a 33 per cent increase in advertising revenue to US$61 billion, year-on-year, for the three month period.

An eloquent Jennifer Bertetto (top) talked of Trib Total Media’s “dire and insurmountable challenges and incredible financial pressure” despite attractive 300 million page views a year to its Triblive.com news site. One problem publishers faced was that 65 per cent of Google users did not click through to the source site, she said. “And it’s nonsense that newspaper haven’t modernised – whatever we did was not enough.”

The legislation would “give newspapers a seat at the table”.

Bertetto was among those who bemoaned the lack of negotiations with Google, and said her company was “punished by the algorithm” for using an alternative which passed on a greater percentage of revenue. She had been told, “Google does it like that and Google owns everything.”

Similar experiences were related by WTOP/WFED’s Joel Oxley, who said “there is no negotiation, believe me we’ve tried”.

Even worse was that they “make changes whenever they feel like it”.

Senator Marsha Blackburn expressed concerns about bias, and the problems small outlets had facing “Big Tech and Big News”, while Senator Mike Lee said that while news publishers had “a legitimate beef with Google and Facebook” over its “de facto tax on every business”, that was not news publishers’ only problem. Some were “rife with shoddy and extraordinarily biased reporting.

“Whatever the challenges newspaper publishers are facing, some – perhaps many – have other problems including inferior product quality and failure to adapt.” He said “the last thing we should do” was to accept a cartel as the solution.

A recording of the subcommittee’s hearing is on YouTube.