California journalism’s fiery wake-up call

LOS ANGELES — I don’t raise this subject idly: Once we defeat these wildfires, California lawmakers have a unique opportunity to study what went wrong with the chaotic information environment in Los Angeles when people’s lives and homes were on the line.

On Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom quietly proposed setting aside $30 million in state funds to support local journalism jobs in California. That’s a nice gesture. But the door is open to think much bigger about filling the gaping potholes in our vital local media ecosystem.

Just look around. While my colleagues in L.A.’s local news industry put their lives on hold and even their lives on the line to cover the fires in Altadena and the Palisades, the profit-driven tech platforms where many of us now get information sat back as conspiracy theories and hate-mongering about our neighbors’ suffering proliferated. Everything from DEI, BlackRock, Ukraine and “Communist China sabotage teams” are getting play as causes of the fire.

If Silicon Valley was going to create a fix for this problem, it would have done so by now. Instead, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan’s show last week saying that “journalists” and “TV anchors” — like the hometown reporters and photographers in Los Angeles covering their own neighborhoods burning down — are a “cultural elite class” that “needs to get repopulated.” Big Tech is telling us loud and clear that it is not going to save us.

Instead, what worked in Los Angeles over the last week was a lot of good, old-fashioned reporting work, just deployed in new and legacy formats alike.

The nonprofit Watch Duty app — the breakout resource of this disaster — became a reliable resource for wildfire information by meshing publicly available data with a team of trained reporters following an editorial code of conduct. As a result, Watch Duty’s team has been more reliable than our public officials themselves, who have sent multiple erroneous evacuation alerts to many Angelenos. Mistakes happen in disasters. That’s why we have reporters who follow the professional ethic of “trust, but verify.”

The legacy local media sector, meanwhile — even as its ranks thin by the year — continues playing its bedrock role during a local crisis. Our local news broadcasters have produced incomparable visuals and news-making interviews about the latest on the ground. Our local news photographers have produced stellar work showing the tragedy and heroism of civilians and firefighters on the front lines; they’re not the ones damaging firefighting planes with unauthorized amateur drones in closed disaster zones. When Patrick Soon-Shiong became a source of misinformation on Elon Musk’s X app about the Los Angeles Fire Department’s finances, his own newsroom at the Los Angeles Times corrected the record about an enormously complex budget issue. The traditional press corps will continue playing a central role in deciphering the knotty policy and political issues unfolding around what went wrong in these fires that policymakers will need to confront.

Professional journalists are like plankton; they feed everything else in the information ecosystem, increasingly serving as de facto (if unwitting) TV producers operating behind the scenes of the increasingly powerful creator economy. It’s traditional reporters who still dig up and supply much of the reliable information that creators pass along to fans who prefer getting their news from a personality. As platforms like Meta turn away from in-house fact-checking toward crowdsourced community notes to fight misinformation, it’s professional journalism that those users often turn to as reliable sources. Although traditional journalism may be less visible in the foreground of a user-populated information environment, it’s still playing a critical role in trying to keep the information economy properly fed and cared for.

California can better benefit from what’s good about the digital information economy (its immediacy and ubiquity) by supporting more of the professional journalists who inject original reporting into the ecosystem while policing the extremes of online hucksterdom. By focusing on supporting the labor of journalism rather than this or that business, you can support the vital work that’s happening at legacy local newsrooms and new Watch Duty places alike.

Don’t just throw taxpayers’ dollars at the problem. We’re probably going to need that cash to backstop some fire insurance policies after what might be the costliest disaster in U.S. history. Instead, go tell Big Tech that Zuckerberg and his friends need to help pay for cleaning up the mess they’re profiting from. We don’t need monopolies’ charity; we need them regulated.

And my union, Media Guild of the West, which represents a lot of the journalists putting their necks on the line for their communities right now, has an idea for exactly how to do that.

As the guild stated in a recent letter to state leaders, the upcoming budget process is an opportunity to rework the journalism settlement proposed by Google in August, which was embraced by some publishers but almost universally condemned by the membership organizations representing California’s journalists.

“This is by far the smallest Google journalism settlement of its kind in the world, too meager to act as a market correction and too broadly structured to target growth or the neediest cases,” the letter stated. “The relatively modest Google and state contributions, once diluted as an across-the-board subsidy for an unknown number of California publishers and journalists, will likely prevent the Journalism Fund’s goal of stimulating journalist job growth across California’s ailing news sector.”

Matt Pearce is president of Media Guild of the West and a former Los Angeles Times reporter. This was originally published at his Substack site.