Jeb Bladine: Politics deals defeat to news-sustaining plan
Initially slim hopes of sustaining Oregon newsrooms with “big tech” dollars sprouted with 2025 evolution of SB 686 in the Oregon Legislature. Tuesday, those hopes were dashed after a flurry of unseemly inside politics produced a 15-14 Senate floor defeat for SB 686, which previously appeared poised for approval.
SB 686 was an intricate plan mandating various mechanisms for Google, Meta and Apple to compensate private and public newsrooms because those giant corporations so greatly monetize the content “scraped” from news websites. Canada approved a similar law in 2023 with financial distributions beginning this year, but this would have been a first in the United States.
At least two Oregon state senators expected to support SB 686 “flipped” their votes at the last minute, perhaps related to fierce lobbying by the high-tech titans and some complaints from tiny news operations about their share of the revenue proceeds. One senator tried to blackmail the Oregon newspaper industry into supporting a bill that would have removed many paid legal notices from newspapers, then used party politics to help defeat SB 686 in the floor vote.
This week, continuing long trends, there were more announcements of newsroom layoffs, reduced publication days and elimination of printed newspaper issues around the state. In 2024, The Oregonian reported that Oregon newspapers “have shed three-quarters of their jobs since 2001 as readers and advertisers moved online, according to data from the Oregon Employment Department.”
Here in Yamhill County, that quarter-century timeline saw closure of the Sheridan Sun, sale and significant downsizing of the Newberg Graphic, and nearly 70 percent loss of jobs at Oregon Lithoprint, Inc., parent company of the News-Register and its printing operations in McMinnville.
Community support programs launched by the News-Register in 2024 will be reinforced with greater urgency this fall following failure of SB 686. Those programs, now led by Community Outreach Director CB Mason, involve promotions for newspaper subscriptions, new advertiser partnerships, membership in the “N-R Press Club,” and community donations through a nonprofit organization for monitored “civic journalism.”
At this point in the column, I could quote the newspaper’s president/publisher about the uncomfortable and awkward situation of seeking community support for otherwise failing commercial operations of a for-profit company. But since that person is me, I’ll dispense with those quotation marks and, instead, quote this week’s column by Brier Dudley, free press editor of The Seattle Times:
“An Oregon proposal that would have saved newsroom jobs and revived its ailing local-news industry died on Tuesday. Oregon was poised to set a precedent and become the first state requiring tech giants to fairly compensate publishers for the value local news adds to their online platforms … Supporters produce most of the local journalism in Oregon, which has around 65 remaining newspapers and around 90 news outlets altogether. More will close, and more jobs will be lost, before the Legislature reconvenes.”
Dudley’s conclusion: Local newsroom stability won’t happen “if legislators keep giving parsimonious California trillionaires more credence than the trusted voices in their local communities.”
Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.
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