Why This Matters

Over the last 10 years, newspaper newsrooms have declined in size by 45%, and in 2019 so far, the media shed more than 2,400 jobs. From massive cuts at HuffPost, Vice, and BuzzFeed to local layoffs at Cleveland’s Plain Dealer and Gannett newspapers across the country, one thing is clear: news publishers are facing an existential threat. Since 2003, more than 1,300communities have lost all local news coverage, and nearly 20% of all metro and community newspapers have shut down. Two-thirds of U.S. counties have no daily newspaper, and 5% of U.S. counties have no newspaper coverage at all.

It has to do with big tech and digital advertising. Since the transition to digital media over a decade ago, newspapers’ advertising revenue has collapsed by two thirds. Google and Facebook dominate the digital world with control of more than 60% of all digital advertising revenue. Companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google are using their tech muscle to monetize news for their own profit, but at the expense of the newswriters. Traffic to online news sites is the highest it’s ever been because of digital advertising, but revenue from that traffic is no longer going to news publishers — it’s ending up in Google and Facebook’s pockets instead. Google and Facebook already gobble up a majority of the revenue from our digital world, and with no regulation or oversight, they have an unrivaled capacity to tighten their stranglehold on the market and demolish the journalism industry as we know it.

Big tech has monopolized the digital marketplace. The monopolistic power of big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple is destroying the economic model of the entire journalism industry, whether it’s traditional circulation newspapers or digital news outlets. Google and Facebook have made acquisition after acquisition, gaining a monopolistic position that lets them dominate the digital advertising landscape and distribute massive amounts of content from news publishers on their platforms without paying to produce the content. If big tech’s unilateral control continues to go unchecked, newsrooms across the country will continue to close their doors, journalists will continue to be laid off by the hundreds, and local news coverage will continue to decline. In order to save journalism, we have to stop big tech from crushing it.