Dallas Morning News editorial on Journalism Competition and Preservation Act says it would also help rural publishers

Clip from Texas Press Messenger; click on it to enlarge. 

Out where New Mexico sticks a corner into Texas and the Pecos River cuts into the Llano Estacado lies Winkler County, the latest county in Texas and one of the latest in the United States to be without a local newspaper. The Winkler County News last published Dec. 23, leaving the county of 7,000, about 6,000 of whom live in the county seat of Kermit, without a reliable, independent source of local news. The publisher of The Monahans News of Ward County said he would "endeavor to cover as much of Winkler County's news as feasible." A small piece of Monahans, on Interstate 20, lies in Winkler County, but it's part of an city-limits appendage that appears to be uninhabited or largely so.

"There are plenty of places in Texas, and across the U.S., where local news coverage has been reduced to its thinnest form, if it hasn’t disappeared entirely," the Dallas Morning News says in an editorial endorsing the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which allow give news publishers and broadcasters to negotiate collectively for compensation from Google and Facebook, which "have come to dominate the dissemination of news and information in the free world. . . . Much of this revenue is collected off the clicks and page views these companies gather from hosting the work of journalists. Most Americans now get their news through either or both of these companies."

Opponents of the bill "say that news publishers and broadcasters can simply choose to share their work elsewhere. But everyone knows that reaching an audience without using Google and Facebook is an impossible task these days," the Morning News says. "The other argument, that newspapers are like the horse and buggy and should be allowed to fade away, is also wrong. This newspaper, like many newspapers, now reaches its largest audience in more than a quarter of a century. More than 10 million unique visitors came to our website monthly in 2021.But most of the advertising revenue that once supported the work of our journalists flows instead to a duopoly that even a company as strong as ours — one of the largest regional papers in the U.S. — cannot negotiate with singularly. Imagine what it must be like for mom-and-pop publishers in rural areas of this country."