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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters here.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal includes no money for a fund formed last year to boost the state’s local newsrooms, casting doubt on whether a heralded effort to help California journalists will amount to anything and how serious Newsom is about supporting the struggling industry.
It’s a significant walkback from an August 2024 deal between state leaders and Google in which they agreed to jointly spend $175 million over five years to fund local journalism.
The deal, which Newsom hailed as a “major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms” at the time, was reached after Google spent a record sum — $11 million — lobbying state lawmakers successfully to drop two proposals that would have forced Google to pay newsrooms for using their content. Under the agreement, the state would pay $70 million and Google $55 million into the newly established California Civic Media Fund for local news outlets. Google would also continue issuing its annual $10 million newsroom grants.
But in May 2025, citing budget restraints, Newsom slashed the state’s first-year commitment to just $10 million for fiscal year 2025-26, with no future state funding guaranteed. Google subsequently said it would match the state’s $10 million investment but no more.
Google was clear in the deal that “its contributions were contingent” on state funding, similar to its journalism funding deal in Canada, said Erin Ivie, spokesperson for Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who brokered the deal in 2024.
A 2019 study by the trade group News Media Alliance estimated that Google made $4.7 billion from news sites in 2018. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, made over $100 billion in the third quarter of 2025 alone — its “first ever $100 billion quarter,” said Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. By Wednesday, Alphabet’s market cap was over $4 trillion.
None of the $20 million pledged has reached local news outlets, drawing disappointment from journalism advocates. The Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, which administers the funds, has received the money and expects to distribute it this year, said agency spokesperson Willie Rudman.
“At this point right now, nobody should be jumping up and down and getting excited,” California News Publishers Association President Chuck Champion said.
Newsom’s lack of proposed funding for future years angered Champion, who said the governor failed to keep his promise.
“He’s more interested in the billionaires and his friends than he’s interested in journalists who are out on the street,” Champion said. “He talks about democracy, he talks about how critically important it is, and then he allows our journalists to starve on the vine.”
The lack of future commitment from the state also raises the question whether Google will deposit anything into the fund next year. Google News Initiative did not immediately respond to a CalMatters inquiry for comment.
Newsom’s office did not respond to questions about his decision to skip the funding this year, directing CalMatters to the state Department of Finance and Rudman.
Lawmaker promises to fight for more funding
“There’s no going back on the deal,” department of finance director Joe Stephenshaw stressed to reporters during a budget briefing earlier this month, saying that the state has already contributed the $10 million promised last year.
Wicks said budget restraints forced Newsom’s hand last year.
“What you saw last year was the budget being what it was,” she said. “Programs across the board got cut and sliced, either got completely zeroed out or significantly reduced, and this is no different.”
But she said she will fight for more funding.
“I’ve been operating on the assumption that [the state] will honor the multiyear commitment,” Wicks said.
But even the full amount of the Google deal may not be enough to “arrest the collapse of independent community news in California,” said former state Sen. Steve Glazer, an Orinda Democrat who authored a bill that would have offered tax credits to employers of journalists by charging a fee to platforms like Google.
“Leaders can’t just talk about protecting our democracy,” he said. “They need to act to direct the resources to support independent news reporting that provides the oversight and accountability of our democratic institutions.”
The journalism industry nationwide has been diminishing. Between 2005 and 2024, more than 3,200 newspapers shut their doors, according to a 2024 report by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University.
As of that year, California had 1.5 news outlets for every 100,000 residents, ranking 45th among all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Between 2013 and 2024, the number of newspaper journalists in California dropped by more than half.
To make matters worse, Congress last year voted to strip public broadcast stations nationwide of federal funding, putting dozens of stations across California in peril. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a national nonprofit that has funded public media since 1967, announced its dissolution due to the funding cuts on January 5.
California’s public broadcasters stand to lose as much as $30 million a year due to the federal cuts, said Assemblymember Chris Ward, a San Diego Democrat, in a letter last month to legislative budget leaders requesting state funding for public media.
Ward, along with 11 other Democratic assemblymembers, is asking for $70 million next year for public broadcast stations.
“California is one of only 16 states that do not provide funding for public media,” he said in the letter. “California’s 33 non-profit public media organizations provide coverage to over 90% of the state, and serve diverse communities in both (the) largest metropolitan areas and rural communities — services that not only include arts, culture, and community engagement, but emergency alerts and education.”
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