Just up the road in Canada, Google is now paying news outlets, small and large, for the value news adds to its platforms.

The $100 million (Canadian) arriving this month will stabilize what’s considered an essential industry, prevent further layoffs and closures, and help keep Canadians informed.

For at least five years Google will make this annual payment, rising with inflation, and equating to around $20,000 per journalist at local outlets.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, or close to it.

When small companies produce things that benefit big, wealthy companies, they should get paid.

That’s especially true when the work is considered a public good, like journalism, and workers are losing jobs because their employers are losing money.

Canada joins Australia and a few countries in Europe with policies requiring dominant tech platforms to fairly compensate news publishers.

Tech companies make billions from online traffic, advertising and trust that professional news brings to their platforms. They willingly pay a few of the largest publishers millions of dollars for content. But they furiously object when told to pay smaller, local publishers that are struggling to survive online.

Canada’s outcome is not perfect. The government agreed to less compensation than expected, and I think it gave Google too much say in how the money is distributed.

Still, Canada’s success at overcoming Big Tech’s obstinance and finding a solution that saves local news is inspiring. It should motivate Congress to enact a similar policy, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, that has broad, bipartisan support but is languishing. It’s also useful for states and other countries considering policies to save their trusted, local press systems.

To learn more I interviewed Paul Deegan, president and CEO of News Media Canada, a trade association that pushed for Canada’s Online News Act. The act became law in 2023 and regulations directing payment were finalized in October.

Deegan’s group also worked with policymakers to improve early drafts of the legislation, to be sure it benefits even small, community newspapers.

Payments may be less than originally sought. But they will be a lifesaver, particularly for small, regional and rural newspapers needing to get paid for the value their work brings to online platforms.

Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.

Dudley: How will the proceeds be divvied up?

Deegan: So it’s $100 million a year, indexed to inflation. Under the regulations the money is divided up between the public broadcaster, which is to get no more than 7%; the other broadcasters, which are largely private but could be not-for-profit, they get 30%; and then the news publishers get $63 million.

Q: Which publishers are eligible?

A: To be eligible under the act as a publisher, you have to cover democratic institutions — news of general interest, the equivalent of cops, courts, city hall, etc.

Q: That was the public policy goal, support news organizations reporting on democratic institutions, right? If the funding went to all manner of media, it would be diluted to the point news media wouldn’t get enough support.

A: That was part of it. Let’s say you’re just, for example, devoted to commentary. You can essentially put up a website, invite people to submit op-eds and stuff like that and not actually pay them. That’s not fair in terms of the distribution of the money. It should be really for publications that are serving the community, rather than each specialty player.

Q: The intent was to preserve journalism supporting democracy.

A: You want a well-informed citizenry. One of the ways to have people who are well-informed is to have a news business that holds the powerful to account, whether it’s politicians or corporations or whoever, but covering a wide range of issues, so that their news diets aren’t just getting something very niche but they’re getting a good understanding of their community.

Q: The definitions are tricky, especially in the U.S. But there’s only so much money and if you want to achieve the policy goals, you need parameters. Are there lessons here for the U.S.?

A: It is tricky but you want to have robust national news, robust regional or state news. But you also want robust town or county news and that’s something we tried to achieve in Canada. I would say, as the U.S. looks at similar policies to this, make sure the local newspaper isn’t just a ghost paper, that it’s actually robust with local news. Cops, courts, city hall, school board, town council — that type of coverage is what’s really needed in communities.

Q: Critics keep saying these policies are just for big media. That’s not true, but how do you respond?

A: I assume the people that are stirring that are the big tech platforms and their surrogates and they’re all, you know, singing from a similar enough song sheet. The evidence in this: In Canada, both Google and Meta did deals with most of the large publishers. When Google did those deals, by signing licensing agreements, they basically admitted or acknowledged that the publisher content has value and value that they were willing to pay for. From our perspective, it’s important that the smaller publishers are included. We’ve got very small publishers now that should be getting a check at some point early in 2025.

Q: That could be transformative for a small paper that’s on the ropes.

A: It’s huge.

Q: The policy does seem skewed, but skewed to benefit smaller publishers more.

A: It should work out, again, to roughly $20,000 a journalist. If you’re a small community publisher, that, on a salary of $45,000, is a large number. Whereas for a larger publisher it would be maybe 20% of their salary.

Q: Australia may bring the regulatory hammer down on Meta for not compensating news publishers anymore. Does Canada’s Online News Act provide that kind of authority?

A: Yes, there is a hammer. The regulator is looking, in Canada, at what they can do to bring Meta on board with this.

Q: Meta says it’s blocking news in Canada but I’ve seen research establishing that people still share news on its sites.

A: It’s not the link, per se, but what you’re seeing is, in some cases, full screenshots of articles. So the proprietary content of the publisher is being shared on their platform and they benefit from engagement around that.

Q: The original motive was to get platforms profiting from publishers’ work to pay for it. Should Canada’s outcome be seen as compensation for use of that material, or is Google simply writing a check to help the news business and be done with it?

A: This should not be seen as philanthropy at all. This should essentially be seen as a content-licensing agreement which, from our perspective, unfortunately, was negotiated by the government. We would have preferred to have negotiated ourselves.

Q: This policy model was birthed by a conservative government in Australia. Now the U.S. and Canada are moving rightward. Should people worry that support for journalism might dissipate?

A: Listen, even though this is under a government framework, this is essentially a private-sector deal. I think if you’re a conservative, leery about something like a state-owned or public broadcaster, I think you want a strong, commercially viable news publishing sector where there’s private-sector funding from, let’s say, the tech platforms who benefit from the content. If you’re conservative and you’re honest with yourself, I think that’s a pretty good solution.

This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.