Sam Clemens, compositor

August 21, 2026 | No Comments
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With the publication of my new book, Hot Type, I’m sharing brief excerpts to give you a sense of the stories in it. Mark Twain is the Zelig of the tale, reentering often, as if a tour guide. Here, he comes on stage as Samuel Clemens, a young printer’s devil working in his brother’s Hannibal newspaper before hitting the road as a tramp printer. This is my way to explain the job, the craft — the art, some would say — of setting type. Following this in the book is an account of the tremendous technological innovations in publishing — steam-powered presses, stereotyping, the telegraph — that Sam saw in this period, all of which will lead the way to the Linotype. But you won’t find that here. You’ll have to buy the book .

In 1847, at age eleven, a fatherless Samuel Clemens begged his mother to let him leave school to work. Two years later, after Sam’s teacher decamped Missouri to join the California Gold Rush, Jane Clemens relented and allowed her son to undertake an apprenticeship at Joseph Ament’s Missouri Courier in Hannibal. He worked as a printer’s devil — composing room dogsbody — for no pay, only food, board, education in the trade, and the promise of two suits. Sam slept on the floor of the office above Brittingham’s Drugstore and received just one suit, a too-large hand￾me-down from the too-large publisher, which “gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus-tent.”

After serving two years, Sam went to work in the Hannibal Journal, a paper bought and run by his brother Orion. It was a dreadful weekly blatt filled with endless transcripts of boring speeches, treacly serialized fiction, and random, useless items passing for news: an inch of snow in St. Louis the week before, a robbery a state away in Illinois, how many brooms orphans manufactured daily in Cincinnati (twenty dozen). In Sam Wheeler, Detective, Sam the author described a village paper that might as well have been his brother’s.

It was a wretchedly printed little sheet, being very vague and pale in spots, and in other spots so caked with ink as to be hardly decipherable. The first column was occupied by “Original Poetry” of the sappiest description. The next four were occupied by a selected story which was as sappy as the poetry. The remaining column of this first page was made up of short paragraphs of vapid, heart-breaking, infuriating rot entitled “Wit and Humor.” The other outside page was built wholly of advertisements: three columns consisted mainly of glorified quack-poisons . . . headed with blurred portraits of the assassins who invented the nostrums, and tailed with lying testimonials from people who had never existed; the two remaining columns were thrown into one, which sang the praises of “Bagley’s Celebrated One-Price Emporium” in riotous display-lines of forty-line pica shot full of shouting exclamation points.

The Clemenses were not noted for their business acumen. The boys’ father, John Marshall Clemens, failed at running multiple general stores. As will become clear in these pages, Sam would prove to be a disaster at business, saved from poverty and obscurity only by his talent as a writer and speaker. Brother Orion was the least proficient of the clan. Stumbling into the newspaper business when he worked as a printer in St. Louis, Orion returned to Hannibal to buy the Journal for $500 on credit, and he promptly cut the price of a subscription from $2 to $1 a year and reduced the price for advertising. “Thus,” said Sam, “he created one absolute and unassailable certainty — to wit: that the business would never pay him a single cent of profit. The paper was a dead failure. It had to be that from the start.”

In the Hannibal Journal, Sam began to write in his rascally voice under the noms de plomb of Rambler and Epaminondas Adrastos Blab, not yet Twain. Once, when Orion was away, young Sam took the opportunity to write and print a news item, illustrated with a childish woodcut, mocking the editor of a rival newspaper, who had purportedly gone to the river to put an end to his lovesick misery. “The satirized editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole Journal office, then he left town and did not come back any more,” reported Twain’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine. Said Sam: “My literature attracted the town’s attention, but not its admiration.”

Mostly, Sam set type, fitting it in page forms, inking it, pressing dampened paper atop it. He was, according to Orion, good at the job, “as swift and as clean as a good journeyman.” Sam stood at the typecase with the text to publish in front of him and a composing stick in his left hand. With the practiced sixth sense compositors acquire, his right hand reached for the correct box from which to pluck the next letter, capitals in the upper case, the rest organized by frequency of use in the lower case — the biggest box for e. Light was supplied by windows in the day, at night by a candle stuck in the d box, dripping its tallow on the k box next to it.

This was not a task for the fumble-fingered. Each metal letter was small, less than an inch long and no thicker than a half-dollar. Sam’s finger felt for a notch molded into one side of a letter’s shaft to make sure it was positioned correctly. Then he added it to his composing stick with a clink. The letters were mirror images of how they would appear in print. As the line filled up, he needed to think ahead and decide whether to split the next word — compositors had to know rules of spelling, hyphenation, punctuation, and grammar. Once that was done, he calculated the spaces, thin or thick, needed between each word to evenly fill out — to justify — the line.

Typesetting, justifying, and correcting all the words in just the paragraph above could have taken an hour of Sam’s labor. Once the type was set, the compositor’s job was still not done, for after the sorts were used in the press and cleaned (in the stench of long-ago composing rooms, that was accomplished with lye and often urine), they had to be redistributed back into their proper nooks in the typecase for reuse. That was not so simple as it sounds, for one had to read each piece of type in mirror image, making sure not to confuse the d and b — minding, as they say, one’s p’s and q’s. At a big-city paper, that paragraph above might have earned Sam twenty-three cents. Orion promised to pay his brother $3.50 a week but “he never was able to pay me a penny as long as I was with him.”

On the press, Sam worked with a colleague. One of them inked the type laid out in a form on the bed of the press. The other placed a dampened sheet of paper in a holder called the tympan, folding down a protective frame called the frisket. He turned a winch called the rounce to move the form and paper under the press’ flat, horizontal platen. Pulling the press’ handle brought the platen down onto the paper and type, transferring ink and text. He then winched the bed back out. The paper came off the type with a kiss, a sticky smack, and they did it all again, as often as 250 times in an hour. The speed of that process determined the natural limit of a newspaper’s circulation: how often the pressmen could pull that lever in the time between the news being set in type and it becoming too stale to sell. The Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge’s Penny Magazine figured in 1833 that the maximum press run for a daily newspaper was 5,000; for a weekly magazine, 20,000. That ceiling on the scale and reach of media was about to explode. And all the skills Sam learned as a journeyman printer would eventually be rendered obsolete by a succession of new inventions….

More excerpts:

Introducing my book ‘Hot Type’

August 19, 2026 | No Comments
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With the release my new book, Hot Type, this week, I will post some good bits in hopes of enticing you into reading it. Here, from the introduction, is a preview of the many delightful rabbit holes I explored building the story of the invention of the first successful typesetting machine, the Linotype, and with it, the birth of mass media. You can order the book here. Please.

The story of the Linotype is many stories in one.

This is, first in my mind, the story of the advent of mass media and its consequences: speed and scale, attention and reach, capital and control. In the early nineteenth century, before the mechanization and industrialization of print, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the United States was only 4,000, limited as it was by the speed and power of human muscle to set its type and pull its press. By the end of the Civil War, steam-powered presses began to speed up production of print at a scale never imagined. Cheap paper manufactured from wood pulp made books, magazines, and newspapers cheaper than ever to publish and buy. Railroads carried these publications and their influence ever farther, while also providing a new time and place to read. The telegraph brought news from around the world as fast as lightning. Literacy was rising fast.

One man (and it was almost always a man) stood in the way of media’s explosive progress and potential: the typesetter at his typecase, adding letters to his composing stick a click at a time. To hand-set the type in just one page of this book would have taken the average compositor as long as two hours. That is why the growing media industry eagerly awaited the invention of a machine to automate the job. “It is discreditable to the inventive genius of this country that the one great mechanical want of our time is still unsupplied,” New York’s World cried in 1869. In an Industrial Revolution rendition of “if we can fly to the Moon why can’t we . . .?”, The World pleaded: “We want the means of supplying the demand for reading matter. The inventive talent of the country produced the steamboat, the cotton-gin, and the electric telegraph.” Why not yet a typesetting machine?

This is the story of that invention. Hundreds of failed typesetting
machines littered the nineteenth century, as did scores of abandoned attempts to build its mechanical precursor, the typewriter and the keyboard. Here I will recount the work of inventors who failed and the few who finally succeeded in revolutionizing print and publishing: Christopher Latham Sholes with the typewriter; Ottmar Mergenthaler with the Linotype; and finally, Steve Jobs with his Mac and John Warnock and Charles Geschke with PostScript, the inventions that wiped out all textual technologies that came before. Their histories are seeded with insight and inspiration, frustration and failure, collaboration and the rare eureka!

This is the story of Mark Twain. He is the Zelig and zeitgeist of our tale, for he will return often. Young Sam Clemens was a typesetter on his brother’s newspaper in Hannibal, Missouri. He was a tramp printer wandering from composing room to composing room across the country, witnessing technological progress in the trade. He wrote for newspapers. As Mark Twain, he was perhaps the first beneficiary of media made mass — and his celebrity helped make it. But the Linotype was his bête noire, for Twain invested his fortune in a would-be competitor, the Paige Compositor. Its inventor, James W. Paige, was a pathological perfectionist, equal parts brilliance and flim-flam, and it was because of him — and other failed business judgments — that Twain’s publishing house folded, sentencing him to bankruptcy and bitterness. Some say it robbed the great man of his sense of humor.

This is a story of technology and our adjustments to it. In the midst of his struggles with the Paige Compositor, Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It reflects Twain’s — and society’s — enamored affair with the technological and new, as the Yankee introduces electricity, steam, telegraph, telephone, and newspapers to Camelot. At its end, the book exposes Twain’s disillusionment with dark modern arts, culminating in a technological Armageddon that foretold the hell of the First World War. Reexamining the technological disruption of the time could not be more relevant to us today as we grapple with the consequences of a connected world and artificial intelligence.

This is the story of labor and technology’s costs and benefits. One might assume that typesetters — the people — wished to destroy typesetters — the machines — as the Luddites smashed looms and Captain Swing rioted against threshers. But no. The International Typographical Union (ITU) recognized the inevitability of the Linotype’s success and made one consequent demand: that its members should be the ones to learn and operate it. After short-term job losses, that strategic foresight led to tremendous growth in employment and in union power — until the trade faced superseding technologies. Inside this labor history is an examination of gender and race. The typewriter was gendered female, bringing women into the new workplace of the office. Typesetting and the Linotype were gendered male, as women were excluded from composing rooms. So was Frederick Douglass’ son, refused membership in the ITU — even while he and his father published their newspapers — because he was Black.

This is the story of capital and early-stage capitalism in the era Twain named the Gilded Age. Because publishing required investment in complex and expensive machines — presses and Linotypes — writing and public discourse became the domain of corporations. Here enters a villain in this opera named Whitelaw Reid, who stole the New York Tribune out from under its founder, Horace Greeley; who forced Ottmar Mergenthaler out of the company he made; who used Mergenthaler’s machine to keep union printers out of his composing room; and who peeved Mark Twain on multiple occasions.

And this is the story of the culture’s relationship with text in a grand arc from the goose quill (and its eventual industrialization with the steel-nibbed pen); to Gutenberg and his material, movable type; to the typewriter, allowing anyone to produce a printed page; to the Linotype and its profound impact on all publishing. The arc of this saga ends with the technology that replaced all that: the computer program called PostScript, which describes letters as shapes alongside other images, opening the way for desktop publishing and the democratization of print — and ultimately the internet and all things digital.

In the end, this is less a story of machines than of human beings: the triumph and tragedy of Ottmar Mergenthaler; the grand friendship and loyalty of his muse and supporter, a presidential stenographer named James O. Clephane; the sad sack inventor of the first successful typewriter, Sholes, with James Densmore, the dogged booster who made it successful; the young woman named Gussie Lewis Troup, who founded a typographical union for women; the 1960s union boss, Bert Powers, whose strikes killed six of nine newspapers in New York while he saved the livelihoods of his members; and the unsung publishing consultant Jonathan Seybold, who connected the dots needed to make writing and publishing on screens possible. You will be introduced to these and other leading players in the Typothetae Personae that follows, and will hear their voices, often in florid and charming Victorian speech, throughout the book.

“The history of the invention of the typesetting machine is a novel or a drama in all its ups and downs,” wrote Karl d’Ester, a German scholar of newspapers and communication. This is that drama. In the first chapter, you will meet Sam Clemens as a printer’s devil, learning to set type. As a tramp printer, he traveled the nation and witnessed disruptions that threatened print’s old ways. As Mark Twain, he threatened staid Eastern culture as he chronicled and named the age and its upheavals. Everything about printing was changing — everything except typesetting. The industry awaited the machine that would finally automate even that slow, complicated, and expensive job.

In the following three chapters, you will see the experiments and failures that preceded both the typewriter and typesetter — most notably Twain’s folly. Then you will meet the inventors who won, learning their bittersweet life stories and, in Chapter Four, witnessing the eureka! that made the Linotype possible. The following two chapters track the success of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company as it ushered in the age of mass media, and as media moguls — and Twain as a wannabe publishing mogul — searched for business models to sustain their new industry.

Next comes the rich tale of labor’s relationship with the machine, from the founding of America’s oldest trade union to the antics of the Swifts, the speedy typesetters who, odd but true, turned their craft into a spectator sport; to the union leaders who led their members to safety in the Linotype age; and finally to their denouement at the hands of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Next comes the end of all that and the beginning of what replaced it: the computer and desktop publishing. Then I return once more to Twain and his disillusionment with technology, celebrity, and humankind.

After it all, I offer my typographical autobiography, for I had the good fortune to live and work in the transition from hot type to cold, material to digital. There I will reflect on how these changes affected my relationship with writing and publishing as a journalist.

More excerpts:

Words matter. Damnit.

August 15, 2026 | 3 Comments
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On this week’s Intelligent Machines, we cohosts had a spirited disagreement about Anthropic’s watermarking of text, as required by EU regulation. The company just released more detail about how it will work, and now I’m upset for a different reason than I first thought.

I’m angry as a writer.

Anthropic’s method will alter its models’ word choices in a pattern based on a key only it knows, allowing it to detect writing (or editing or translation) by its machine — to an uncertain degree of certainty. The company contends there is no difference in meaning between the otherwise random choices “grey” or “overcast” in, for example, the context of weather. So what’s the issue?

Thus Anthropic declares words fungible, language random, choice meaningless. Not to me. I try to select my words as carefully as I can for a number of considerations: style, tone, rhythm, avoiding repetition, but most of all meaning. You may quibble with my choices, but they are mine, not yours; that’s what makes my writing mine, to communicate what I wish to communicate. “Gray” and “overcast” are not the same, damnit. That’s the reason we have both of them.

So I resent Anthropic et al dismissing the value of a writer’s selection of one word over another for the impact that decision has on expression, on impression — occasionally on art.

We humans might not be able to detect whether the machine or the key is being used. That’s not the point. The selections/changes/alterations made in accordance with the key will affect sense and style on an ever-larger proportion of text entering discourse, and the fact that Anthropic (and the EU) consider this acceptable, unimportant, even trivial has cultural impact on the worth of words. They devalue writing. At the very moment when LLMs commodify writing and writers, this is just another kick to the kidneys for a challenged craft.

And why is this forensic breadcrumb trail being required? Because of prejudice against the technology: fear unto moral panic. But technological solutions to perceived technological problems have just as many unintended consequences as the problems themselves, often more. The irony is that in a zealous effort to protect the distinctiveness — the sanctity — of human text, the authorities and the technologists deprecate what makes text human.

In my new book Hot Type, I quote critics such as Friedrich Kittler insisting that typewriters changed how Nietzsche, Hemingway, or Hesse wrote and thought. At the end my book, in what I call a typographical autobiography, I recount how technologies, from typewriter to computer to PostScript, affected my composition and cognition. These technologies affected my methods, but that makes my prose no less human. We should debate what the impact of this next technology, AI, might be on creativity and perception, but we should give that process time. Rushing to regulatory and technological solutions to a problem not yet fully understood is foolish.

So I’m pissed.

Here is a sentence from the first page of Hot Type, one I chipped away at innumerable times. These are the choices I made:

Unlike what we now call machines — computer chips veiled inside sleek and sealed grey boxes with no moving parts, save fans to cool their brains— the Linotype’s innards were left exposed, as if to show off the genius of its works: its troop of idiosyncratically shaped cams, gears, belts, arms, and wheels marching to instructions foreseen more than a century before by their inventor, German-born watchmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler.

Now let us recast it with perfectly acceptable synonyms, as Anthropic’s detection key might, in composition, editing, or translation. In fact, I asked Claude to do just that. Here is what it delivered as “a synonym-substituted version, keeping the structure and meaning intact.”

Contrary to what we presently term machines — microprocessors concealed within polished and enclosed grey containers with no moving components, except fans to cool their circuitry — the Linotype’s mechanisms were left visible, as if to display the ingenuity of its craftsmanship: its brigade of distinctively shaped cams, gears, belts, arms, and wheels progressing to directives anticipated more than a century earlier by their creator, German-born horologist Ottmar Mergenthaler.

You may find Claude’s just fine. I find that it misses the wonder, cadence, and anachronism I tried to convey. Anthropic’s engineers and the EU’s regulators may ask, what’s the prob? Much, I say.

AI Communism

July 27, 2026 | 1 Comment
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In response to the spectre of Chinese open-weight AI models haunting America, Dean Ball, OpenAI’s director of strategic futures [are there directors of strategic pasts?], issued a warning more shrill even than the New York Post’s alerts about Mamdani’s bus-and-grocery socialism. 

One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a “public good” which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of “digital public infrastructure.” This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I’ve never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn’t ultimately concede this is where things end.

As Jason Howell and I discussed this on our podcast, AI Inside, we found ourselves asking, What would be so wrong with AI communism? What if there were AI for all? Eh, comrades?

Imagine all that could be created, often for free, on top of open AI models: how many universities and researchers, startups and entrepreneurs, artists and students could better afford the technology. Imagine the greater control that comes from locally hosted models. Imagine the greater transparency and security that comes with openness. And imagine the power — pricing and political — that could be wrested from the new AI giants as they barrel toward their IPOs…which, of course, is precisely what frightens them. But you need not imagine all this, for open-weight models are affording these opportunities now. 

By championing open AI, we could atone for past sins (including mine) of insufficiently supporting openness in the first phase of the internet, leading to the fencing of the commons. Open AI may be our best and only defense against its oligarchic domination. As the wise John Palfrey, head of the MacArthur Foundation, just said, “This is a design moment — for the technologies, for the way we relate to one another across geographic and political boundaries, and for what the future looks like.”

A week after Ball’s cri de code, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang posted an open letter supporting open-weight models, now signed (as I write this) by fifty AI giants — pretty much everybody who matters … except Anthropic. Even Ball’s bosses signed. It is a remarkable endorsement of open computing and a message to governments. I recommend reading it in full:

The Washington Post puzzled over why Nvidia et al would “take a stand that helps their Chinese rivals.” (Note that Post owner Bezos’ Amazon has not signed this letter.)

But of course, open-weight AI is in the business interests of Nvidia and AI chip companies: the more AI is used, the more chips are needed. Locally run, open AI is also in the interests of countless companies. I hate to find myself agreeing with Palantir’s Alex Karp, but he tells his corporate clients they should run open-weight, locally hosted models so they don’t give over the souls of their business to the frontier AI companies; this is his business model.

Openness is also in the interests of an enlightened AI industry, as it creates competition and that yields greater innovation. This is why an AI pioneer I greatly respect, Yann LeCun, doggedly supports open-source AI and why he founded Project Tapestry, “a new open-source platform for globally federated development of frontier AI models — preserving local control and long-term independence.”

Now just as sanity was emerging in the discussion about AI, moral panic reared its sweaty head again when credulous media reported that an OpenAI model had gone rogue and “hacked” into Hugging Face. This turns out to be another instance of the doom-as-marketing strategy engaged in by both OpenAI and Anthropic. It is their way to attract publicity and venture funding and control the conversation about regulation of AI. In truth, OpenAI’s model was engaged in a security test; it only did was it was instructed; it has no sense of right or wrong or “hacking;” it isn’t a rogue threat to society, no matter how much the AI boys would like to believe they hold such power.

The chef’s-kiss irony of the Hugging Face affair was that the platform found American models useless in its defense against the “hack” because they were all hampered by guardrails forbidding them from undertaking tasks regarding security risks. Hugging Face had to rely instead on an open-weight Chinese model.

Such panics, predictably, lead to threats of government control of AI, and that worries the hell out of me, especially and obviously given the IQ of the current administration. In Congress, Reps. Ted Lieu (D-California) and Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) have proposed the AI Kill Switch Act, which would require major AI companies to install the means for their models to be shut off in the event of a “credible risk.” And who will have the power to decide to pull the plug? The secretary of Homeland Security.

No, no no. 

When I attended a World Economic Forum (Davos) AI event in San Francisco sometime ago, one faction of worrywarts urged the banning of open-weight, open-source AI because users could turn off guardrails, and then who knows what chaos would ensue. But as I often argue, guardrails are fools’ comfort, for there is no way for any model maker to anticipate and thus prevent every possible malign or accidentally harmful use to which their tools could be put. That doesn’t mean that AI companies should not be expected to try to prevent against known malicious or dangerous acts. But AI is a general machine, like the printing press. There was no way to tell Gutenberg to design his movable type such that no future Martin Luther could ever make mischief with it.

Open-weight models are our best defense against hegemonic control of the technology by either governments or huge AI corporations. They are also the best way to put AI into the hands of more people, not just those who can afford to spend fortunes on hosted tokens. That throws a wrench into Sam Altman’s plans to sell back to us our collective intelligence as if it were a commodity. “We see a feature where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water,” Altman says, “and people buy it from us on a meter.” Thereby, Altman concedes that AI is, if not a public good at least a public utility. 

Now I will object to the idea that what AI offers is “intelligence.” That is a gross anthropomorphism that, by its very conception, competes with and excludes humanity. But for the sake of this discussion, for the moment, let’s use it.

If intelligence is an asset that can be created and shared, flowing as from a spigot, shouldn’t we all have access to it for the greater benefit of society? Isn’t that all the more reason to endorse open-weight, open-source AI that we can run and train and adapt and control and benefit from on our own? 

Yes, free, open-weight models will always be two steps (read: six months) behind the so-called frontier models. But open models will be able to do 99 percent of what 99 percent of people want to do with AI. Still, there will be business opportunities aplenty for AI companies to build specialized models, trained on specialized information, for specialized tasks of high value. In fact, it would be much more productive if the companies would concentrate on that instead of pursuing their bullshit goal of building “artificial general intelligence.” 

Now I’d like to take this discussion one step more: If “intelligence” is a public good, should not the data needed to train models be? For if we all can benefit from open models, who would want them to be less intelligent? And does it not follow them that data, civic information, and by extension journalism should be open? 

Oh, I can hear the howls of protest, for I’ve heard them for years: How will the gathering of that data and information be paid for? One answer is universities, where research is subsidized. Or it was, until America’s right-wing extremists opened war against the institutions of education and science. 

As for journalism, it is not a forever thing. Before the economics of mass media and the attention economy overtook news and civic discourse, society operated differently. Limited by the technologies of the time, before steam-powered presses and Linotypes, publications were small, often both created and shared socially. Now that mass media and its attention economy are the walking dead, we will need to reconsider every model of gathering, sharing, and utilizing public information. My point is that the discussion about open-weight, open-source AI forces us to ask similar questions about what open journalism would look like. Eh, comrades?

California’s squandered opportunity

June 26, 2026 | No Comments
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California is about to hand out $20 million — half from Google, half from the state — to news organizations, and it is wasting a golden opportunity.

Instead of building a new and more competitive landscape of news, instead of creating services to benefit the entire news ecosystem, instead of investing in innovation, instead of embracing new news partners such as libraries and community organizations, instead of imagining a new future for journalism, the California Civic Media Program is going to end up sending too many checks to the hedge funds that have ruined news in the state.

I am sorely disappointed and rather angry. For imagine what $20 million in one year could do to set an example of innovation for the nation.

There’s much history here. Lobbyists for the old, hedge-fund-controlled newspaper industry — the rebranded American Newspaper Publishers Association of 1887 — have been flogging protectionist legislation from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, to Sacramento, arguing that lawmakers should tax tech companies, which they say took ad revenue away from the media moguls (as if God had granted it to them).

In Sacramento, this took the form of the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA). It was terrible legislation. I was commissioned by the California Chamber of Commerce to write a white paper on it and I went to Sacramento to testify against it. I argued that policymakers should look instead to the New Jersey model of private-public support for journalism based not on payrolls in dying, legacy newsrooms but through open grants to anyone applying with innovative plans to serve communities’ needs.

Meta said if CJPA passed, it would pull news off Facebook and Instagram, as it did in Canada when it passed similar legislation. Apple apparently called in favors and was excluded from the bill. This pretty much left Google holding the bag. Negotiations ensued that resulted in plans for a promising public-private partnership, without legislation.

At first, much of the funds were to be administered by the state librarian, a former journalist, who understood the scope of opportunity. I offered suggestions on how the money could support real community-based innovation. I introduced the state to true innovators who are working with libraries as hubs of community information, with community members trained to cover their own governments, with public media building support for the larger ecosystem. Many folks were excited about what could be done.

Then the state pulled the program away from the library in favor of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz). Working with deputized agents and an advisory board, the resulting program will give money to the owners of news organizations based on present headcount of journalists: $20K for each of up to five full-time journalists, $10K each for up to 15 more, up to $250K per news organization.

There are conditions. The news organization must be at least three years old. That is blatantly anticompetitive, excluding the startups that are the fresh blood journalism so badly needs. Broadcasters are also excluded.

But there are efforts to serve under-served communities. Applicants will be prioritized based on answers to “three short narrative questions on their coverage of disinvested audiences, ongoing viability, and planned use of funds.” And 13 percent of the funds are to be set aside to support smaller newsrooms in communities with greater information needs.

Still, most of the money will likely end up in the pockets of out-of-state hedge funds, just as their lobbyists intended.

When I’ve spoken with legislators in multiple states, I’ve tried to remind them that they need no longer fear publishers who now buy ink by the thimbleful, not the barrel. Mass media are the the walking dead. They cry poverty. But they still invest in lobbyists.

Some advocates for the future of news are essentially saying this program is better than nothing. I disagree. It is a wasted opportunity and a dangerous precedent.

This is the first year of the program. If this is all it does, it should die. If it continues, I’d hope that wiser heads would prevail to create a program that supports growth in the ecosystem (with startups), services that help the entire ecosystem (e.g., ad networks, training, shared technology), inclusion of new participants (e.g., schools, libraries), and innovation (don’t preserve the news that was, invent the news that can be). Note well that alongside various philanthropies, Google does just this with its News Initiative. 

For the record, Google is not at fault for how this has turned out. The company made clear from the start that it would not influence the use of funds. Responsibility falls to the state government and its agents. I hope they go back to the drawing board. (In disclosure: I have raised funds for the universities I work with from tech companies, including Google and Meta.)

For the sake of historical context, I look to the 1947 Hutchins Commission report on a crisis in American news, which even then saw a crying need for greater competition and diversity in news. “Monopolistic practices, together with the cost of machinery and the momentum of big, going concerns, have made it hard for new ventures to enter the field of mass communications…. Can the press in the present crisis rise to its responsibility as an essential instrument for carrying on the political and social life of a nation and a world of nations seeking understanding? If not, will its irresponsibility deprive it of its freedom?” There is less machinery needed today, thanks to the internet, but the monopolistic, protectionist, and exclusionary reflex of old publishers has not changed a bit.