Go to the meetings or talk to people in town or follow your neighbors who care on Twitter/Facebook? If you really care what happens at your city council, and you live in a city of less than 1 million people, you can generally meet all of them and know what's happening. Cities greater than 1 million often support a regional-level paper which also covers city news.

So everyone in the city of less than a 1 million should go? What about the meag cities? How are people supposed to have time, energy or resources to achieve that? The news has always been about democratizing information that impacts civic life, hence why a "free press" was written in the constitution. Its a civic service that needs supported and the current model of incentives no longer supports adequately. There are no easy answers to address the dying of newspapers but saying that people should just go to the meetings is not an answer.

Presumably if more than the 30 people who show up care about the city council, then there will be someone who reports about it and writes something up, maybe like a substack, about it. Maybe they will call it something pretentious like "The $city Times" or "The $city Chronicle" and combine that newsletter with other topics of local interest. Maybe they will innovate a physical delivery format, too, that delivers the news on paper. Then they can really charge people for it.

This is literally all just a question of supply and demand. The only people who care show up, and the rest wouldn't even spend $2 on a local newspaper.

Also, you don't have to go to the meeting to know what happened there: all of these councils and committees produce minutes that are accessible from your city's website. I bet out of that city of 1 million, only 2x as many people read the minutes of the city council (which are almost always public) as go to the meeting. The production of those minutes is a public service.

this is just local journalism, except from some random blogger and not trained journalists.

Journalists didn't have a college training program until about 50 years ago. This used to just be "journalism."

Yeah I used to ardently read the newspaper for the local suburb I was living in a few years ago and felt super connected and informed about issues (which meant I was less confused about all the names on the ballot come election time).

Then I moved to a suburb which didn't have that newspaper and now I have no idea about anything nor are there any avenues for me to learn. And I have kids, so no, I'm not going to all those meetings.

It is a social good that nobody cares enough about to pay for it themselves.

Yes, that's how it usually goes with social goods. That's why many of them are government functions rather than a private businesses.

I'm not sure that local news is something I want as a government function, though...

Exactly. And we rarely use regulation to force unwilling parties to produce or pay for them. This is like making a regulation saying that public parks are good, so restaurants have to build parks.

you don't need a metaphor here. the world's largest communications platform is using content generated by journalism organizations to make money, and those orgs are now asking for a piece of it. it's that simple.

Yes, and those communications platforms should be able to say "No" if they would rather not serve links to articles.

> Yes, and it is in no way the responsibility of the communication platforms to ensure journalist are profitable.

they aren't. this is akin to licensing content.

"Licensing to link" is a bit different from "licensing content".

And we don't need a license to link. We have never needed a license to link. You published it in public; that's my license to link. The only access restrictions have been robots.txt and restrictions the site itself imposes by technical means.

IANAL, but so far as I know, the controlling precedent is Ticketmaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster_Corp._v._Tickets.....) If you put it online, I can link to it. That's been the legally-defined rules since 2000.

So if California wants to change that, they're very probably going to lose the court case that is almost certainly going to be triggered by this bill. And then, as others have pointed out, the result will be that nobody links to the news sites, and they lose traffic instead of gaining money.

Licensing implies a choice. At a minimum, social media companies should be able to decide if they want to allow links to news companies and negotiate the rate.

Journalists can't report on what local city governments are actually up to, because if they did, they'd be sued into oblivion.