California’s blockbuster journalism bill isn’t yet signed into law but its progress still offers lessons to other states hoping to save their local-news industries.
At the risk of jumping the gun, I asked California Assemblymember Buffy Wicks what advice she’d offer policymakers.
The Oakland Democrat and appropriations chair spent years championing local news.
This year she co-authored Assembly Bill 2222, the Community News Act. It could provide news outlets with annual tax credits totaling more than $50 million, if it’s signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“Our hope is that this does spur more job creation in this space and allows for full-time employment of more journalists here in California,” Wicks said.
The bill was introduced by Christopher Ward, a San Diego Democrat, and approved by the legislature in late August.
One lesson, Wicks said, is to build a strong coalition across the news industry. She learned that the hard way, after an earlier bill was attacked by a subset of the industry allied with Google and Meta.
California may also prove that intervention must be large to have a lasting effect. Its policy would provide enough support to regrow newsrooms, which would help outlets build their audience and add subscribers.
“The goal really was for newsrooms to not just hang on by a thread, but actually to be proactively employing full-time journalists, which is just a total departure from where I think publications have been over the past 10 years,” Wicks said.
Wicks tried to go big with a 2023 bill requiring tech giants to pay for news content, mirroring proposals in Congress and policies in Canada and Australia. It died after the state made a deal with Google to instead split the cost of a $175 million journalism-support fund. Then state funding fell short, Google cut its commitment and it’s now a $20 million “civic media” grant program.
That plus tax credits should turn things around, Wicks said.
“With these two programs moving full-steam ahead, it’s going to help abate some of the hemorrhaging, of the loss of newsrooms in California, and shore them up and make sure they have stronger financial underpinning and can move forward and do all the good reporting that we need them to do,” she said.
Tax credits to help newspapers were first proposed in Congress in 2020 but never passed.
New York, Illinois and New Mexico since passed state versions providing $15,000 to $20,000 per newsroom job. These programs are designed to preserve outlets’ independence and ability to report critically on government.
California would provide $20,000 for up to five newsroom employees, and $15,000 for additional ones, to sustain jobs.
To incentivize hiring, an additional $15,000 would be available for new positions. The program would run five years and be funded by eliminating a deduction provided for corporations’ highest paid employees.
Unlike other states, California didn’t cap what outlets may receive, Wicks said. It would also give credits to nonprofits, even though they’re already subsidized by having taxes waived.
Washington waived its business tax on publishers in 2023, saving them around $10 million over 10 years.
The Local News Initiative’s late 2025 tally found Washington had 153 news outlets, including 98 newspapers, serving 8 million people. California had 607 outlets, including 283 newspapers, serving 39.4 million.
Rebuild Local News, a nonprofit that lobbied for AB 2222, has said it will generate more than $40 million for outlets.
An early state analysis estimated it would cost the state $24 million in the 2026 fiscal year and $55 million in subsequent years. After it was bundled with the corporate tax change, the package was estimated to increase state revenue $9.9 million the first year, $15 million the next and $23 million in fiscal 2028-29.
Newsom’s office didn’t respond before my deadline but Wick was happy to share. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:
Dudley: Do you have advice for states or legislators thinking about wading into this?
Wicks: The media landscape is so diverse and often those entities have different bottom lines financially. So it’s difficult to figure out how to create programmatic resources for such a diverse group of people, and it takes a lot of work, to tether together all of these different interests.
Q: I didn’t see division that surfaced with previous journalism bills.
A: There was so much division when I was doing the civic media fund, it made it very, very difficult. It just takes a lot of time and energy to bring everyone together. And so, if there are other lawmakers who are looking to ensure that their newsrooms are thriving, figuring out how to do that coalition-building is really critical because if publications are warring with each other, it makes it very hard.
Q: You didn’t have Google and Meta sowing division, like they did to stop earlier bills.
A: Yeah, they were difficult. I hope the takeaway isn’t “don’t try to make them pay” because I still think they have to pay. I totally, totally, totally agree with that. But there are other tools in the toolbox. I’m like a “yes and all of the above” person when it comes to this. We should be trying all the different things and figuring out how we can do it. California hopefully will serve as a bit of a model here and a bit of a petri dish in terms of what’s going to be effective.
Q: It seems policies to save local news must be big to change the industry’s trajectory.
A: Well, there’s so much need. That’s the problem, right? You’re losing them by the week, by the month, they’re closing down shop, and then they just don’t exist. We have to have a healthy landscape here. That’s why my hope is the civic-media fund combined with the tax credit, the two programs, will lead to real, tangible resources for publications. Not just money in the pocket but also hire more journalists. I’m sure you’ve experienced as others have another round of cuts. You’re hearing about these in newsrooms all over the place. This kind of flies in the face of that, in a really beautiful way.
Q: What’s your advice to legislators thinking about something similar but wondering if it’s too late, that the industry’s dead?
A: Well, the industry can’t die because democracy depends on it succeeding. So we have to have a can-do attitude. The other thing is, I would learn from our mistakes and follow the debates and fights we’ve been having here in California. The good news is we’ve gotten all these different publications and tech companies and legislators of different political stripes all on the record now on this stuff, and it’s like a road map for other states. They can see where the political pitfalls are. Obviously, each state’s different, but there are similarities that can be brought to light here. And I’m a resource for other lawmakers who want to think about how to approach it.
Q: That’s great.
A: It starts with leadership. It starts with a lawmaker who cares about this issue, who’s willing to fight for it and for the publications and put their political capital into it and their shoulder to the wheel. It’s not for the faint of heart. But the payoff is worth it because, and I’m not being hyperbolic, the health of our media landscape is critical for the fundamental success of our nation, of our government, of our democracy, and so to me that’s a fight worth having.
