WGA East Decries Big Tech’s “Negative Impact” On Journalism
deadline.comThe WGA East, decrying the “negative impact” the Big Tech giants are having on ad revenue for news organizations, has submitted written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Competition, Antitrust and Consumer Rights for its hearings on “Breaking the News – Journalism, Competition, and the Effect of Market Power on a Free Press.”The WGA East, which represents film and TV writers and news writers at CBS News and ABC News and numerous digital news sites, urged the subcommittee “to examine the huge, negative impact of Big Tech companies on the ability of news organizations to raise enough revenue to employ professional journalists to do their essential work.”Sen.
Amy Klobuchar, the 2020 presidential hopeful who chairs of the subcommittee — and is the daughter of a newspaperman — has introduced legislation to rescue the struggling local news industry. “Local news is facing a crisis in the U.S.,” she said last week. “These Big Tech companies are not friends to journalism; they are raking in ad dollars while taking in news content, feeding it to their users and refusing to offer fair compensation.”The guild noted in its statement that a Pew Foundation report found that 63% of all advertising revenue in 2020 was from digital advertising, that nearly two-thirds of all digital ad revenue went to Big Tech companies and that 55% of it went to Facebook/Meta and Google/Alphabet alone.Noting that all news organizations face the challenge of paying for professional journalists while “Big Tech takes the lion’s share of the advertising revenue,” the guild said:“The tech platforms do not pay writers and correspondents and editors and producers and crews to investigate and report the news.
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