When I began my career as a journalist 64 years ago, newspapers were practically a license to print money because they were the main medium for advertising by retail businesses such as supermarkets and department stores, as well as to the general public through classified ads.

However, in the 1990s the Internet emerged.

At first, newspaper owners were happy that their content was being re-shared by other websites. Then, as they grew into large advertising companies, they became powerful competitors. Classified ads, the most profitable form of advertising on a page-by-page basis, also largely disappeared. They could not compete with free websites like Craigslist.

Meanwhile, the retail companies that once formed the financial backbone of newspapers found themselves in competition with online sellers like Amazon.

All of these trends have been bad for the newspaper business. At the turn of the century, some newspapers closed, and the number of surviving newspapers shrank as circulation and advertising revenues declined.

What happened to the Los Angeles Times, California’s largest newspaper, is emblematic of the decline. In the early 1990s, the LA Times had a huge staff of journalists and sold over a million copies a day. But as circulation and advertising revenue declined, the Times also shrank and went through several ownership changes before being purchased in 2018 by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a wealthy Southern California physician.

Soon-Shiong pumped new money into the Times, which expanded its staff and made a valiant attempt to recapture its former glory. Eventually, however, the paper shrank again because its owner grew tired of covering $40 million in annual losses.

In March of last year, the Times printed an article about the closing of its downtown printing plant. The last print run was 100,000 copies, less than a tenth of its peak three decades earlier. The paper is now printed by another company.

The decline is very evident in coverage of the state Capitol. Even small California newspapers once had reporters in Sacramento, but today only a few papers, including the Times and the Sacramento Bee, have offices in the Capitol.

In fact, my employer, CalMatters, was founded nine years ago specifically to fill the widening gap in Capitol coverage, and it has succeeded beyond expectations by making its enormous output available free of charge to anyone who wants it – including the newspapers that still exist.

This journalistic story sets the scene for one of the Capitol’s most contentious issues in the final weeks of its 2024 session: legislation that would force Google and Meta – the parent companies of Facebook and Instagram – to pay newspapers for their content and mandate that the majority of the money go to paying journalists.

California Assembly Bill 886 would emulate a Canadian law that has brought newspapers around $75 million annually. But the two tech giants are fiercely opposed to the bill. They have launched an advertising campaign against the bill and threatened to stop publishing newspaper articles.