With the days dwindling down to a precious few to get legislation passed this year, the National Association of Broadcasters was looking to provide some positive reinforcement this week of one particular effort, applauding revisions to the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill that would strengthen their hand in negotiating compensation for online aggregation of their original content.
NAB president Curtis LeGeyt praised the work of bill backers Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and and John Kennedy (R-La.), as well as Reps. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) and Ken Buck (R-Colo.).
The bill would give "news content creators" -- print, broadcast, or digital -- an antitrust safe harbor to negotiate collectively with digital platforms like Facebook and Google for carriage of their original content.
Specifically, the bill grants publishers immunity from federal and state antitrust laws for a 48-month period while they bargain collectively with digital platforms.
The coordination among bidders has to be "directly related to and reasonably necessary for negotiations with an online content distributor" and [cannot] involve any person that is not a news content creator or online content distributor.
News content creators are defined as ones with 1) a dedicated professional editorial staff that creates and distributes original news and related content concerning local, national, or international matters of public interest on at least a weekly basis; 2) are marketed via subscriptions, advertising, or sponsorship.
The Senate Judiciary Committee had scheduled a markup of the bill for earlier this month, but as NAB anticipated it has been held over until after the August recess.
Among the bill's biggest draws for NAB are that it would require Big Tech platforms like Google and Facebook to negotiate in good faith, much as the FCC requires broadcasters and cable operators to do when negotiating retransmission consent.
According to NAB it would also explicitly allow all local broadcasters engaged in specific journalistic activities to participate in collective negotiations, "regardless of their size or views expressed within their content," and make clear that joint negotiations does not make any change to copyright law protections.
"This legislation would address the dominant power Big Tech gatekeepers wield over local media outlets, including television and radio broadcasters, by enabling fair negotiations when digital platforms seek to offer their users access to our valuable community-based content," said LeGeyt. "We thank the bill’s cosponsors for recognizing the need to preserve local journalism in our communities and look forward to continuing working with them on advancing this bill through the legislative process." ■
