Gov. Gavin Newsom and Google reduced their contribution to fund struggling California news outlets to stay afloat.
In the past decade, more than 100 news outlets in California have had to shut down.
The California Local News Fellowship was founded to help local newspapers and news websites that struggled to stay open.
California planned to give $30 million to start the fund, and Google promised to give $15 million. The goal was to support local newsrooms, train new journalists, and develop tools like AI to help journalists do their jobs.
With the $12 billion budget deficit, according to CalMatters, Gov. Gavin Newsom decided to cut California’s contribution to the fund from $30 million to $10 million. Right after Google also lowered its amount from $10 million to $5 million according to Calmatters.
These changes could hurt cities like Riverside, California, where local news is already hard to keep going. Riverside is a part of the Inland Empire, a region that’s lost many news outlets in the last few years. According to a report by Northwestern, California has lost over 25% of its local news outlets in the past 20 years, and Riverside is one of the areas most at risk.
Some small news outlets have had to rely on private donations to stay open. In 2024 a nonprofit newsroom called The Riverside Record received a $100,000 grant from the National Press Forward fund to help support local reporting.
According to The Riverside Record, they received it in funding for a two-year period and sought to support small news outlets. This shows without state support these types of local papers may struggle to continue serving the community
To address this issue, California State Rep. Buffy Wicks helped create the California Civic Media Fund, which aims to pool money from the state, tech companies, and charities to support journalism across the state.
Now UC Berkeley will be running the fund, and it will now be managed by the California State Library. A nine-member advisory board will be made to guide the fund’s operation. The fund will still launch, but with less money than was promised reported by the office of Assembly member Buffy Wicks. Local news outlets hope it will still help, but the results are uncertain.
