A bi-partisan bill, the “Community News and Small Business Support Act,” is making its way through the House of Representatives. It would offer tax breaks to small local news organizations and small businesses that advertise with them.
According to the media advocacy group Rebuild Local News, House Bill 4756, introduced by Reps. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) and Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), gives small businesses with 50 or fewer employees a tax credit of up to $5,000 in the first year of the bill and $2,500 in the next four years to help pay for advertising in local news organizations.
The bill covers traditional advertising in print newspapers, TV and radio as well as local news digital sites, such as The Augusta Press, and non-profit news organizations.
“News” organizations owned or majority-funded by political action committees are not eligible.
For small electronic and print newspapers, the bill also allows the employer (with less than 750 employees total) to claim up to $25,000 per journalist, as a refundable payroll tax credit in the first year and up to $15,000 for the next four, according to Rebuild Local News.
In a question and answering session with The Seattle Times, Delbene stated, “This is making sure that folks are focused on local news and local news organizations are allowed to continue and thrive. We’re losing newspapers every day, and so our policies are focused on making sure we help support those organizations.”
Due to several factors, news deserts, locales with no source for local news, are springing up all over the United States. Rural areas and small cities are the most at risk.
Local newspapers have been in serious decline over the past 15 years and according to Northwestern University, 70 million people now live in areas where there is either no local news coverage or the local newspaper is at risk to shutter.
Media at times acts as a “canary in the coal mine” in terms of economic indicators as the first sure sign of a recession is small businesses canceling their advertising. The Great Recession of 2008 decimated the news business.
In 2008, the once mighty San Diego Union-Tribune became one of the first dominoes to fall, eliminating more than 100 jobs or one-tenth of its entire workforce.
As a result of declining ad revenues and the soaring costs of printing hard copies, many independent newspapers in mid-sized cities were forced to sell out to large conglomerates and hedge funds, according to The Atlantic.
According to Debbie van Tuyll, executive editor of The Augusta Press, many independent owners were forced to sell because they knew that upon their deaths, their heirs would not have the means to pay the death taxes associated with owning a newspaper.
Many owners thought that by selling out, they were saving their community’s newspaper, when in fact they were allowing them to be led to slaughter. The owners of the hedge funds, according to The Atlantic, began gutting newsrooms from coast-to-coast to please the company’s stockholders.
In some cases, newspapers merged but kept their individual mastheads. However, newsrooms were consolidated so that one staff would be responsible for the content of several regional newspapers. Due to the smaller staffs, coverage of the outlying areas of a municipality suffered.
Augusta, in 2008 had a locally owned daily newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, which also printed two county weeklies, and there were other small independents such as the Metro Spirit, the Verge and the Buzz on Biz that printed weekly or monthly.
A decade later, the only locally owned, as opposed to corporately owned, newspapers left in Augusta were The Jail Report and The Metro Courier.
Newspaper subscriptions and advertisements had been in decline since mid-20th century, but the global economic collapse in 2008, along with unworkable business models in the Internet age, caused them to tumble even further. The rise of social media exacerbated the problem. According to a Pew Research Center study, 48% of Americans reported in 2021 that they got some or all of their news from social media.
As a result, the conglomerate-owned newspapers were forced to cut coverage even further. The journalism graveyard expanded to include local editorial writing and editorial cartoons as well as much feature reporting such as fashion, entertainment and automotive columns.
Many longtime weekly county-wide newspapers became “ghost papers,” offering only enough content to maintain the county legal-organ status.
The good news is that the 2021 Pew Research study figure of 48% of people relying on social media for news was down several percentage points from an earlier study, which is an indication that people may be getting tired of reading click bait.
I believe that the success of The Augusta Press is a major indicator that local journalism is not dead; however, TAP did start up at a time when the industry was on life support.
Producing news is a costly business, whether the news is published in print or electronically. The average salary for a journalist has fallen over time to a median of $47,425 in Georgia, according to ZipRecruiter.
Such low potential wages mean that fewer and fewer people go to college for print journalism, and many colleges no longer offer a stand-alone journalism degree program.
House bill 4756 not only provides for struggling small businesses to do more advertising, which stimulates the overall local economy, but it helps small newspapers like TAP offer better wages for our reporters and to add even more warm bodies to our newsroom while keeping the cost of a subscription low.
And the bill does that by lowering taxes. Go figure.
It is my hope that our local Congressional delegation will sign on as supporters of this needed bill.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
