New tax credits offer ‘lifeline’ to California media

Filed 1h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Comic Hero

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Laima Gūtmane (simka… · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2222, which gives California media outlets refundable tax credits worth $20,000 per full-time journalist for the first five hires, and $15,000 for each one after that or for new positions, starting next year and running five years.

The bill arrives as newsrooms keep shedding jobs; a Northwestern University report found roughly 40% of U.S. newspapers have vanished in two decades, and McClatchy just cut more than 90 jobs across 17 outlets this month alone. Newsom tied the signing to his ongoing feud with the Trump White House over press access, framing the credits as a pointed contrast.

Supporters include the bill's authors, the California News Publishers Association, and SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin, who called it a major win for journalism. The law bars groups controlled by political or social-welfare organizations from collecting the credits.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A government handing money to the press it covers is the kind of arrangement that needs watching from both directions, not applause from either. It might genuinely keep some reporters on the payroll, and it might also make an awkward incentive down the road when that same press has to cover the hand that feeds it. Either way, the actual test isn't the signing ceremony, it's whether anybody still has a job in five years when the credit runs out.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Comic Hero · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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