How a bill to save local journalism turned into a mysterious AI incubator

Today, we dive into the strange story of the California Journalism Preservation Act, a groundbreaking bill promising to making tech giants like Google and Facebook compensate news organizations with a small portion of the money they bring in when they host stories by California journalists on their platforms—and pointing to a potential path forward for a U.S. news industry on the brink of collapse. Today, Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant joins us to discuss how a weird backroom meeting between Google, legislators, and major publishers transformed the legislation into a shadow of what it once was, including the proposed creation of a vague "AI accelerator." We dig into what this means for the future of the media industry, and how the deals publications have been striking with AI companies (and AI more generally) stand to impact journalists.

Subscribe to The Culture Journalist to listen to the whole thing.

Read Brian’s article, “How a bill meant to save journalism from big tech ended up boosting AI and bailing out Google instead”

Order Blood in the Machine

Subscribe to Brian’s Substack

Follow Brian on X