News Media Alliance applauds journalism protection bills

The News Media Alliance is praising a recent effort on Capitol Hill.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) have introduced the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act” in the U.S. Senate. The bill, similar to H.R. 2054, introduced in the House last month by Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) and Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), would provide a limited safe harbor — a four-year antitrust exemption — for news publishers to collectively negotiate with Facebook and Google for better business arrangements. 

A hearing before the U.S. House Judiciary’s subcommittee on antitrust is set to address the matter. The hearing is scheduled for June 11 at 2 p.m. Eastern. Testimony will be available to see at judiciary.house.go.v

The News Media Alliance has been vocal over the last year in advocating for such legislation, which it believes is needed to address the imbalance in the news publisher-platform relationship, according to a release from the News Media Alliance.

The News Media Alliance recently published findings from a new study that says the platform received an estimated $4.7 billion in revenue in 2018 from crawling and scraping news publishers’ content, without paying the publishers for that use.

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