There were days when owning a local newspaper was like a license to print money. Advertisers didn’t have options. Many local newspapers had de facto geographic monopolies. The advertisers bought ads. The newspapers thrived financially.

That financial security bought the ability to report on the Legislature, the city council, the schools, local sports — all things not easy to make money off of.

The burst of new media options has been a bonanza for consumers. What interest or opinion is not served by TikTok, a website or some other new platform? The juicy bits that used to draw readers to legitimate news sources have been picked off and with them goes advertising dollars. Even some “news” outlets measure performance in clicks and page views or aggregate the efforts of local journalists.

So who is left to watch the government? Who investigates where the money goes? Who is honoring the peaks and valleys of people’s lives? Oregonians get the journalism they subscribe to. Local news deserts have grown across Oregon and across the country. The newspapers that remain have shrunk.

Want more news deserts? Oregon House Bill 3431 and its companion in the Senate, Senate Bill 437, are the vehicles that take Oregon there.

They are not intended that way. They are intended to offer local governments more alternatives to publish required legal notices.

But the fact is they lower standards. They will lead to more picking off of the profits with websites that only do the minimum. The bills would hurt existing news operations by taking those legal notices away. There is already a path for online news operations to publish legal notices if they want to do it.

Additionally, taking public notices away from fact-based news publications is a disservice to the public because the information would be more difficult to find, and it’s a win for government bodies that seek to hide relevant information communities are entitled to know. H.B. 3431 and S.B. 437 would be another blow to democracy.

Legislators should just kill those bills.

Senate Bill 686 is almost the complete opposite. It aims to get online giants to compensate local Oregon news organizations for use of their content. It requires large, online platforms to pay digital journalism providers or donate to a new civic information forum dedicated to getting Oregonians better information about their communities — better journalism.

Some call this Oregon’s “Google bill” and it’s a fair shorthand. Do a search on Google and when news items pop up, there’s already enough of a summary that many people never click through to the source. Google gets rich off of local newspapers’ content at the expense of the local newspapers.

The Columbia Journalism Review found in 2023 that Google makes roughly $21 billion in revenue from news-related searches, and concluded that it should pay about half that amount to news publishers.

This bill aims to capture some revenue for local journalism, as has been done in Canada, California and for some big New York papers. Oregon journalists deserve it, too.

H.B. 3431, which would hurt Oregon journalism, already had a public hearing. The bill that would help Oregon journalism, isn’t even scheduled for one. What does that say about this Legislature’s priorities?

Legislators can either help news organizations bloom or grow the deserts.