• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, April 16, 2025

Last week, a group called Free Press Action argued that Oregon’s SB 686, a bill designed to force Google and other online platforms, to pay newsrooms for using their content, would, on the contrary, help media giants more than small newspapers. It seemed pretty persuasive.

Not so fast. Another group -- the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild -- counters that SB 686 would level the playing field and require Meta and Alphabet to pay for news appearing on their apps. 

“Working journalists provide the content, including stories, photography and video, that Oregonians find on Google and other digital platforms,” said Mai Hoang, the president of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, a local of The NewsGuild-CWA, during an appearance before the Oregon State Senate Committee on Rules. “When there are fewer journalists, there’s less reliable information that Oregonians can access.”

“It speaks volumes that these gigantic digital platforms are responding to this bill and others proposed in other states by threatening to censor and take away news content from their sites and depriving their users of valuable and vetted information. They call it a business decision – I call it a refusal to properly pay the news outlets  – and the journalists who work for them.”

So which way is it? For its part, the NewsGuild-CWA will support only those bills rhat require 70% of new revenue will be used to finance newsroom jobs. 

But there is opposition: As written, SB 686 would divert “millions into the pocket of corporate media giants (like Sinclair, Gannett, and Nexstar), marginalize smaller community publishers, and incentivize tech platforms to block local news content entirely,” Free Press Action warns in a letter to the Oregon Senate’s Rules Committee.

On the surface, they seem to support the same goals, but disagree on how to get there. In fighting big tech threats and bullying, SB 686 is better than nothing.