California taxpayers will pay $15 million to hire journalists

Los Angeles Times

4 days ago

California lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom jammed through a $322-billion budget last month. The biggest headline: Spending to provide healthcare for many undocumented immigrants went away.
But there's a nugget that you might have lost in the fine print: Taxpayers will fork out $15 million to hire, train and deploy dozens of journalists around the state. Yes, we're all in the publishing business, together!
It's actually been this way since 2023, when state Sen. Steve Glazer of the Bay Area town of Orinda secured $25 million to start the California Local News Fellowship program. That paid for the first three years of the program, and the hiring of about three dozen journalists in 2023 and again in 2024, and soon in 2025, to cover subjects like education, healthcare, the environment, social services and the criminal justice system.
The new spending approved last week will create a fourth round of reporters in 2026 (each cohort is hired for two years) and launch a new program to help train news editors.
The expenditure once again puts California into stark contrast with Republicans and the Trump administration, which last week slashed $1.1 billion over two years in support for public ratio and television. (You might have noticed local stations like LAist and KCRW cranking up their fundraising appeals to backfill the missing funds.)
Paying to support one of America's least popular professions might strike some as a) foolhardy b) wasteful c) unjust. But I am going to go with d) wise. Specifically, penny-wise. Here's why:
Accurate news and information has become an increasingly fleeting resource. But it's one that should rank not far behind clean air, food and water on the list of things we need to maintain a healthy and fair society.
You might have noticed that information you can trust is becoming as rare as a parking space in San Francisco's North Beach. That's largely because one-third of California's newsrooms have closed in the last 25 years, and more than 65% of journalists have lost their jobs, Glazer noted in a Sacramento Bee op-ed.
That's meant 'leaving many communities exposed to unchecked misinformation and government opacity,' Glazer wrote, along with Martin G. Reynolds, co-executive director of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. That's the institute that will be helping train editors to meld the next generation of journalists.
The first-rate journalism school at UC Berkeley has overseen the fellowship program and matched journalists, who make $60,000 to $65,000 a year, with news outlets.
I haven't had a chance to review all the work of the dozens of journalists who have been deployed around California. But I have seen that one reporter, assigned to the Modesto Bee, wrote about a small community's struggle to get safe drinking water. KVCR radio in the Inland Empire got a news fellow who has doggedly reported on the reaction to recent immigration raids. Another of the fellows wrote about how inflation and food insecurity had pushed more people to seek food from nonprofits in Chico.
All of this, and a lot more, has been produced for a relative pittance, 0.005% of a state budget of $322 billion.
Make no mistake, funding of a few dozen fellowships, alone, will not solve the information crisis. A much bigger investment will be required. That's why the Legislature has been looking toward the information economy's biggest companies as a potential source of support for journalism.
Internet giants like Google — with a recent annual revenue of $359 billion — have been enriched by high-quality news content while news outlets have been cutting staff. Some in the state want the digital giants to pay to support outlets that employ reporters, editors and photographers.
They're the ones, after all, who provide the stories that often pop up at the end of Web searches. But the final outcome of that fight remains to be decided.
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