It's so crazy because the people who are getting the most exploited by these platforms are the ones coming along and telling the legislature, like, oh, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Matt Pierce. Matt is the president of Media Guild of the West and a former Los Angeles Times reporter. Matt and I have been talking

for a while about having him on the show to talk about a couple bills that had been proposed in

California that were designed like some bills in Canada and Australia to get these major tech

companies, in particular Google and meta, to start paying some money to journalism as, you know,

we've continued to see the struggles that

the media industry has faced over the past number of years and the major layoffs of journalists

that have been happening. And, you know, the broader recognition that that has some really

significant impacts, not just on our ability to know what is happening in our communities,

but I think that we generally associate a

healthy media with a healthy democracy. And so if we don't have a healthy media industry and

journalists who are able to do great investigative journalism and local journalism, then, you know,

our democracies start to suffer from that as well. Now, that's not so much the discussion that I

have with Matt,

because I wanted to talk to him about these bills and how ultimately Google was able to influence

this process to sideline them and to put in its own process that is much worse than what was

ultimately being proposed in these Senate and Assembly bills in California. But then I also wanted to talk to him about some bigger picture issues, right?

What he sees as being the ultimate problems that journalism is facing and whether tech is at the

root of that, you won't be surprised to hear his answer, I think.

But also how he is seeing the internet itself evolve and how we often have this discussion

about how hyperlinks are so key to what is happening online, but how these platforms are

really changing that expectation and changing the way that we consume information online

so that the idea of linking to these various pieces of information is not so much how the internet is working

...