SACRAMENTO, California — The University of California, Berkeley will not host a planned $125 million partnership between state officials and tech giant Google meant to fund cash-strapped local newsrooms, leaving the state scrambling to fulfill the landmark journalism deal.
A representative for UC Berkeley’s journalism school confirmed the move to POLITICO on Wednesday, citing concerns about how funding would be administered. The school’s decision now leaves state lawmakers without a clear venue to host the program and adds further uncertainty to the controversial deal reached with Google last summer, billed as a first-in-the-nation solution to mitigate the impacts of readership moving online.
Complaints that Google News’ aggregation has decimated the industry have been especially acute in California, where once leading national newspapers like the Los Angeles Times have suffered mass layoffs.
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks had negotiated the agreement with Google last August as a compromise to legislation that would have forced the tech giant to send a portion of its monthly ad revenue to newsrooms. The deal would send a total $180 million to California journalism programs over five years, beginning in 2025. Of that funding, $125 million was earmarked for a proposed News Transformation Fund housed at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
But school officials said Wednesday they penned a letter to Wicks’ office in mid-October, informing the Bay Area Democrat they could not host the fund because the school would not have the power to determine how money would be allocated to newsrooms. The agreement would leave such decisions up to a seven-member board that has yet to be named.
“Our campus can’t serve as a passthrough for funds from Google and the state to local newsrooms,” Elena Conis, acting dean of the journalism school, told POLITICO in a statement.
Conis added the university remains “fully committed” to state efforts aimed at infusing funds into California newsrooms. It already hosts a separate, state-funded journalism fellowship program, where the university employs journalists and assigns them to local newsrooms around the state.
Wicks’ spokesperson Erin Ivie confirmed the assemblymember had received the letter and has had “continuing conversations with members of the journalism school in recent months.”
The deal with Google has faced scrutiny from the start from journalists’ unions, some news publishers and Senate lawmakers — including Pro Tem Mike McGuire — for not securing more cash from the tech giant. Union groups were particularly upset that the deal contained more than $60 million to research and implement artificial intelligence, a technology journalists fear could replace their jobs.
Doubts also began to emerge early on about the participation of Berkeley’s journalism school: UC President Michael V. Drake said at the time of the August agreement that the university system was “ready to support this endeavor,” but the journalism school itself told media outlets it never gave a formal acceptance.
Ivie declined to comment on which university could take UC Berkeley’s place. A spokesperson for the University of Southern California — which had previously indicated it was approached by state negotiators about potentially housing the fund — told POLITICO Wednesday that no final decision has been made.
“We are learning more, and no commitment has been made,” the USC spokesperson wrote in an email Wednesday.
Neither Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office nor Google responded to requests for comment.
Newsom included $30 million for the journalism fund in his 2025 budget proposal released last week, as the state agreed to in the deal. Google did not respond last week when asked if it had sent its $15 million commitment to the fund for 2025.