Rebuild Local News’ Matt Pearce is trying to help journalists and lawmakers speak the same language

MATT PEARCE: I had been a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. I was part of the unionization effort there around 2017. In 2020, I became the president of the local we created after that unionization, Media Guild of the West, which aimed to represent journalists in all sorts of different newsrooms in Southern California, Arizona, and Texas. [Talking with journalists from a cross-section of print and digital media,] I was seeing a lot of us were dealing with the same problems economically, which is the thing that, as a journalist and guild member and bargainer, first got me thinking about the revenue problems that we’re all dealing with. Otherwise, for the most part, [those problems] are pretty invisible to working journalists right up until the moment they get fired, they’re laid off, or their news outlet shuts down.

…Senator Glazer’s SB 911 was the first piece of economic policy I worked on. It was one of the earliest state-level bills that proposed to spend state resources on supporting local news.

…When I got to the legislative arena, working on legislation for the first time, I realized that the skill set of being a guild organizer and a bargainer mapped very closely on to doing media advocacy at the legislative level. You’re haggling over language, you’re trying to organize people, you’re trying to reconcile sometimes strongly conflicting opinions, you’re trying to build power and leverage, you’re often also looking [for] places where you can reach settlement. I felt like a fish in water. It felt like I instantly understood the power dynamics of the political process. I also had this incredibly specific skill set that gave me a uniquely broad perspective on local media and some of the problems that journalists and local media were facing in their different types of news organizations, along with the labor skillset to try to do something about it, which up until that point had always just been internal to the newsroom.

I took a buyout from the L.A. Times in 2024. It was rapidly contracting under Patrick Soon-Shiong; about half my coworkers lost their jobs. I spent the next year wrapping up advocacy as an unemployed person who was still the local president, which was a volunteer, unpaid, elected job, working on the Big Tech legislation in California….That was Assembly Member Wicks’ California Journalism Preservation Act, and Senator Glazer’s data mining mitigation fee, which would have taxed Big Tech a billion dollars a year, half of which would have gone to journalist employment subsidies, both of which didn’t pass, [but] created the California Civic Media Program, which has had a long and winding history that is now kind of, sort of, maybe reaching its deployment of its funds. [Applications opened July 6.]

That was my background that led me to Rebuild Local News. My predecessor, policy director Anna Brugmann, had moved on to National Public Radio…They are also getting more active at the state-level game.

PEARCE: Imagine something like an octagon shape that has all of these opposing corners, kind of on a spectrum from each other, and they break across practically every category that you can think of — from print to digital, from legacy institution to startup, commercial to nonprofit, big and small.

That’s not even getting into all the different philosophies people have about media and what the future should be, which are tremendously diverse. An octagon may actually be too simple for the amount of complexity that’s out there.

One of the challenges of this space is that it is very hard to get two local media people in a room who will say the same thing in the same meeting. There is an enormous range of opinion. There’s growing interest in policymakers to make positive action to support local news, but [the policymakers themselves] are consistently surprised at the complexity of interests they encounter in our world when they start working on some of these policies.

It feels like part of my own mission is to try to create opportunities for cooperation where possible, try to find if there are any alignment of interests that can make policymaking happen in a constructive way, try to translate for policymakers where these friction points are in the local media community. [Generally,] the more political engagement you see at the state level, the more you see a plurality of [media] interests expressing themselves, which can be confusing for the lawmakers. So it’s an interesting combination of factors to navigate, but the positive part of it is that the interest to do something is there.

PEARCE: Yes, because lawmakers, when they are making public policy in 2026, are working in economic tradition more than I think is the case in a lot of our shared journalism spaces. I do think you’re seeing a trend in academic research to try to articulate a little bit more the economic implications of local news and local news policy.

In my corner of the world, when we are going to these lawmakers to say, “Hey, we think there’s this range of options that you could enact to support local news in a meaningful way in your community,” they are having to balance that against all the other economic factors they’re dealing with in the state budget — the schools, the hospitals, the tax base. A lot of other advocacy interests that are working on general funds requests or general economic policy are using economic analyses that are less common [in the local news world].

I think you’re starting to see our space supply more resources to lawmakers to try to make the economic implications of local news production and local news readership, the loss of local news, more intelligible to lawmakers.

Why are they motivated? State-level lawmakers, in particular, are some of the best readers of local news [in certain respects]. They get their ideas for legislation from reading local news. Local news tells them what’s going on in their constituencies, where the friction points are, where there are problems to be solved, where there are opportunities to make a positive contribution from a policymaking perspective.

They also have much more direct contact with local news as newsmakers than most people. So they notice when there are fewer journalists asking questions. They sometimes want to get attention on something that they’re doing, and find that there’s no one out there to pay attention to what they’re up to. Also, sometimes, they have friction with other policymakers or other interests, and they want to complain about something in the media.

So they notice when they lose those trusted third-party verifiers who in some ways try to digest all this political conflict that is a normal part of political life. I’m finding that they are quite sensitive to the loss of local news.

They have [also] seen that other states, like New Jersey and Illinois, have made early efforts to do positive interventions in local news. [That makes legislators feel like] they’re not doing something super exotic or controversial. I think that’s part of what you’re seeing in this snowballing of political interest to do something. There are [now] proofs of concept out there that help make the case for them conceptually.

I think that’s very important, just raising expectations for what’s possible politically for the local news world — because our expectations are really very low after many decades of inertia. The sector broadly was so profitable for so long that the nature of the crisis was different in previous eras.

PEARCE: Many government agencies at the city, county, and state levels have advertising budgets that have already been allocated to them. These are taxpayer dollars that they spend on trying to reach the community. In a lot of places, these public dollars are not being spent advertising with community media outlets; some are being sent out of state to Big Tech for targeted advertising, or to national cable.

Cities moved first on saying that at least a certain portion of these public dollars spent by public agencies should be spent on advertising through community media. New York’s Ad Boost program has delivered more than $70 million of public advertising to community media outlets in New York City after an executive order from the Mayor’s office saying that city agencies need to be spending at least 50% of their dollars there.

There’s real money there. But one of the challenges of getting those sorts of policies done is that the executive branch is usually the most resistant politically to policies that they think encumber them from spending ad dollars how they please.

So the trend that has emerged over the past year is this intermediate step of getting state governments to first report out where ad dollars are currently being spent. California, Minnesota, Illinois, Colorado, and just now, Connecticut — Illinois and Connecticut were Rebuild Model Bills — are now going to be requiring state agencies to [do this], so we can have a bit more empirical grounding for the conversation about what level of spending with local media is appropriate from a public policy perspective.

The first data that we’ve gotten back came out of Minnesota. My deputy, Lori Henson, who’s focused on these policies, did an analysis and found that overall, according to the data, Minnesota agencies are spending less than 30% of their advertising budgets with local media outlets in Minnesota. That’s not consistent across agencies. Some departments are doing a lot more advertising with community media, other departments are doing almost none….[Because of this transparency measure,] we’re going to have a lot more data from different states toward the end of this year, and I think it’s going to fertilize the soil for more specific conversations about what level of spending is appropriate to support local media.

We very much view these as “buy local” policies. Government advertising is one of the very few places where you can have the government explicitly spend on in-state businesses in a way that doesn’t violate the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which otherwise tends to frown on policies that discriminate between in-state or out-of-state businesses.

PEARCE: Maryland’s bill would have been the most aggressive bill of its type in the country, by requiring Maryland agencies to spend at least 50% of their advertising budgets on local media. It passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both chambers at the legislature. A lot of local advocates, including some of whom are pretty close with Governor Moore, had a lot of confidence that he was going to sign the legislation.

So the veto itself came as kind of a shock. More than that, the veto came with a pretty lengthy letter expressing a lot of opinions that had not come up during the legislative debate, some of which we think are unfair. He mentioned something about paywalls, and the policy does not mandate that public agency dollars have to be spent on paywalled local news outlets; there’s still an enormous amount of discretion to government agencies on where they want to advertise in the local media community and using what criteria. So, there are things that the governor raised that were not actually implied in the policy, which was frustrating for us, because I think if there had been opportunity to have a dialogue about some of those concerns, we could have done some myth-busting, or could have talked about some of the elements of the policy.

He did express interest in doing something to support the local media community. I know that the advocates locally are very eager to get back to the table and figure out something that works.

So Maryland is a kind of stay-tuned situation, but the upshot is that there is a broad amount of bipartisan legislative support to do something. I think [what’s] not surprising is that when you do see resistance to this particular type of policy, it usually comes from the executive branch, since they are the ones effectively being affected by this policy.

PEARCE: Instead of just lighting your money on fire by sending it out of state to Big Tech companies, dollars that will never come back, except in the form of Google and Meta stock prices, the state has the opportunity to do a little bit more local economic development in a way that I think can still achieve state agencies’ goals.

But, I mean, something that I would stress is that all of this, the whole range of media policy that we’re talking about, these are all first-generation policies. In many, many places, policymakers are encountering these policies and these arguments for the very first time. So on some level it is inevitable that there’s going to be a lot of friction, a lot of exploring, a lot of debate, there’s going to be some adaptation.

I don’t want to give the impression that what you see is all there is. This is very much an evolving process. Policy proposals get put in the field; we see how local stakeholders and policymakers react to them; we identify where there might be weaknesses, either from a policy or political perspective; we try to make improvements and iterate, iterate, iterate, and make the process a little bit easier, make the policies a little bit more digestible to lawmakers, and keep improving as we’re going.

There’s not any one idea that’s going to address everything that’s broken in local media; it’s probably going to be a lot of different policies that do different things and have different trade-offs. But the imperative is that we keep collecting not just empirical and financial data from the policies themselves, but political data, of how we are doing with policymakers.

In the local journalism world, we are not super-duper experts at the political process. We are experts at doing excellent journalism and providing quality community information. If we want to be more successful, we have to adapt to the political system that we have. And in some respects, these are the lawmakers who have been elected by the public, so in a way, this is us encountering the public and the public’s imperatives, too. And I don’t want to overstate that, but I do want to emphasize that the political arena is a different world from the one that we share with each other at conferences, in our trade publications. Politics is an away game for us, so we’ve got to practice.

PEARCE: Yes. The journalist employment subsidy, whether it’s tax credits or grants, is another policy we’ve seen growing momentum for this year.

Local advocates in New Mexico successfully got what we think is proportionally the largest or most generous journalist employment tax credit in the country, compared to Illinois and New York, when adjusted for population. With California GO-Biz, the civic media program, there was an intense amount of lobbying and disagreement over what the structure of that allocation of the $20 million should be in 2026; GO-Biz ultimately decided to go with a journalist employment subsidy, largely based on our model journalist employment subsidy that we published this year, which we’re also running as a bill in California, AB 2222. That bill just passed out of the Assembly on a 63-10 supermajority bipartisan vote.

Policymakers like the journalist employment subsidy partially because it’s very clear, and has a basic sound economic principle behind it: If there’s not enough local news, you can have more of it if you make it cheaper to produce local news by employing journalists. Simultaneously, it is a policy that can reach across many different types of media outlets and business models in a transparent and broad way.

We got some really interesting data points in the early data back from Illinois and its Journalist Employment Tax Credit: [More than] half the dollars went downstate, outside of Chicago, and [the funding] was sent out with very little administrative overhead. It’s a very “efficient” public policy to have a big broad geographic distribution, compared to something like philanthropy, [which] sometimes can be more urban focused.

The other data point in that distribution was that most of the benefiting newsrooms were small. Two-thirds of them had six or fewer local journalists. So effectively it was a very efficient way to shoot dollars to a lot of different types of local news outlets, and to achieve a kind of minimum viable political coalition of all the diverse interests that can gain from this type of policy.

That said, we’ve made some improvements off of the first versions of the journalist employment subsidy. We now recommend, based on what we learned out of Illinois, that benefits be supercharged for the first five journalists employed at a local news outlet, which will end up shifting even more resources toward smaller publications. We also think it’s really important to include a new hire incentive.

I think those [changes to the journalist employment subsidy] signal something that policymakers find attractive when they’re trying to balance interests, because they are hearing from every direction, and all these different media stakeholders, about how well or not well policy works for them. The biggest friction point for this type of policy is that a lot of the very smallest micro producers — like a sole proprietor who uses a lot of freelance — are not fully covered.

It’ll take a whole suite of different interventions to try to cover the different corners of this space and create a balanced portfolio of public support….[At Rebuild], in developing our next round of model policies, we’re talking internally about [ways to] provide some targeted support for the very, very smallest micro publishers to balance out these other types of policies that are getting some political traction, but may be harder to access for [that group].

PEARCE: One other trend I would flag is that we’re seeing growing interest from Republicans. They are, generally speaking, most interested in our small business advertising tax credit. It’s not a policy that has been enacted at the state level anywhere yet, but we had a Republican in New Hampshire introduce one of those, and [multiple] Republican co-sponsors on that bill. In Illinois, the Assistant Minority Leader in the House introduced a version of our small business ad tax credit as well, though that didn’t go anywhere this year.

So we are seeing some interest from Republican state lawmakers on doing this stuff in a way that I think they find politically satisfying. The upshot of that policy is that it also lowers advertising costs for regular Main Street businesses, so they can please a couple of constituencies at once.

We’re seeing Republican support on the other bills too. But we’re always looking for what can have bipartisan [appeal] — and I would hope for nonpartisan consensus on public policies that can be durable, because it’s very risky to have a policy movement that is only concentrated in one political party.

We worked on a bill in Utah that was advanced by Governor Spencer Cox after the Charlie Kirk assassination. He started getting very critical about social media and decided that the state should have a targeted advertising tax on megafirms. And we persuaded lawmakers to include, in the dedicated fund that they set up, funding allocated for civic information programs, along with the funding that they were going to allocate for mostly children’s welfare otherwise.

That was a place where the bill doesn’t announce with its full chest that it’s a local news policy. And Utah doesn’t actually have a civic information policy yet to spend those dollars on, if and when they come in depending on [how expected legal challenges go]. But that was another place where we’ve got a toe in the door to crafting an agenda that can work [outside of] places like California or Illinois or New England, which have [the advantage of] momentum built on years of policy work.

[In terms of] lessons learned, one of the biggest challenges that I think [the local news world] faces is complexity. We are somewhat challenging for lawmakers to understand, partly because local news is not, in the economic realm, a constituency that they’ve had to deal with before. They’re not as read up on the economic diversity or the different philosophical perspectives across our sector. [So] it’s a lot for them to take in when they hear a lot of different opinions from across the local news world when a given policy is up for consideration.

Also, in many places, local news advocacy works are not really becoming more centralized. We’re not seeing a coherent united front. We’re seeing, if anything, a more pronounced expression of differences.

Paradoxically, I think that puts more responsibility and power on the shoulders of the lawmakers. [They have to] try to interpret those arguments and decide which direction to go, because when they’re hearing a lot of different perspectives about which policy element to include, or what people like or don’t like, they’re not [necessarily] going to get consistent pushback from the local news world as a coherent force against one type of argument versus another.

The more engaged that some states get on local news policy, the more authority is given to lawmakers to interpret and make decisions on what they’re hearing. I don’t know that that’s as true for places with more centralized or aligned [local news] coalitions.

I don’t think that’s good or bad, but it affects the strategies that someone like me or an organization like Rebuild Local News has to adapt in navigating different types of local political context, because we are not a publisher ourselves — we’re just a third-party organization that tries to provide expertise and resources. So how we interact with a given state, if at all, has got to be dependent on the local political circumstances.

I come back to my guild organizing days. It reminds me of being in charge of a union: You’re navigating a lot of complex, different interests, different departments, jobs, wage levels, seniority levels, philosophies. The job of media organizing, if you’re trying to make positive change and progressive change, is to try to find the minimum viable alignment of interests that can allow you to be successful when you’re dealing with the folks outside the tent, because that’s where the money is.

PEARCE: More government advertising data is going to come in later this year, and it’s going to provide a little bit more empirical clarity about trends in existing government advertising. That is going to inform whatever debates are going to happen next year on government advertising policy.

Big Tech remains a very hot subject in our world. The bargaining code efforts, I think, have really struggled since the collapse in California, and so I think there’s a lot of conversation about where that policy is going.

There’s a really rapid growth of conversation about AI scraping. [My sense is] there have been a lot of conflicting opinions in the local news world in recent years about the exploitativeness of Google and Meta. You saw this divide between larger commercial publishers saying that they were getting ripped off by the advertising duopoly, and a lot of very small publishers saying, “Hey, this is good for discoverability. We’re maybe less aligned on some of the bargaining code policies.” But I think that the hyperextractive nature of AI scraping — not just in terms of taking everybody’s stuff, but also as a competitive technology that’s competing and sapping consumer eyeballs by taking local news and repurposing it in the form of AI summaries without any compensation — [is building what may be] a broader consensus than we have seen before, that this is exploitative and extractive, and something should be done.

We don’t have a policy framework right now in the field as an active bill that directly addresses AI scraping across the gamut. There are conversations about [ideas like] organizing into licensing groups, collective rights management kind of like the music industry, copyright…So that is all very rich territory for a public policy conversation. The AI scraping conversation is very much an international conversation, too.

PEARCE: I think there’s been a huge sea change in the way the local news world thinks about public policy.

When I was first starting to do this type of work in 2022, there was way more resistance from the news community around me about concerns about government interference and [retaining independence]. [But] I think the writing is on the wall for a lot of folks: The economic crisis in the local news sector is so urgent that the balance of concerns have tipped toward some kind of intervention. And I think some of the early experiences, like in Illinois, have assuaged me [and show] that it is actually possible to create these policies in a way that respects press freedom and doesn’t create surface area for the executive branch to come in and reward or punish the press based on their journalism or expression. A lot of policies we’re working on are explicitly designed to avoid creating opportunities for coercion or capture or retaliation. There’s still philosophical conversations about what kind of government support is appropriate or inappropriate, and I think they’re extremely important, but that’s been something that I think has been reassuring.

The more that I do this stuff, the more that I am humbled by the complexity of interests and the need to just keep making marginal improvements every time we go to the plate. We can’t rest on our laurels and say, “We had a good idea. It’s the only idea that’s possible, the only framework that’s good.” [We have to remain] very sensitive to what we’re learning from the local news space, what we learn from the data, what we learn from the political process, and just continue to adapt. I think a lot of those little marginal improvements are going to quickly add up to a lot.

That’s not very sexy. A lot of what I’m doing is not sexy — in fact, a lot of the most important stuff I’m doing is completely out of public sight, [like] explaining to a legislative staffer where the fault lines are and the challenges they may run into. But it’s going to matter a lot.

The thing is, it doesn’t actually take all that much money to make a pretty significant difference for the beneficiaries. That’s encouraging — though it reflects, to some extent, how much the sector has shrunk. It doesn’t take that massive of an investment to make a big difference.