"California has a problem. It's not homelessness, a lack of housing or the state's increasing unaffordability, all of which have been documented at length. It's truth decay. If you believe that information is the taproot of knowledge and expanding personal vistas is key to learning, there's a case to be made that the great Golden State quietly, with scant notice is growing more impoverished by the day."
"In the last quarter of a century, a third of California newsrooms have closed. Nearly 7 in 10 journalists have lost their jobs. The relentlessly cruel economics of the news business, driven in good part by the voracious profiteering of monoliths such as Google and Facebook, has devastated the industry including the newsroom that employs your friendly columnist drastically shrinking its output and leaving California, like the rest of the country, vastly worse off."
Local news in California has drastically declined, with a third of newsrooms closed and nearly 70% of journalists losing jobs over 25 years. Economic pressures, amplified by the profit-seeking behavior of dominant tech platforms like Google and Facebook, have shrunk news output and weakened civic information. The resulting information vacuum is increasingly filled by partisan, propagandistic, and self-interested sources posing as objective truth-tellers. A proposed policy to compel tech payments was weakened into a $175 million, five-year Google investment, a compromise seen as inadequate to address the systemic erosion of trustworthy local journalism.
Read at www.mercurynews.com
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