Governor Gavin Newsom has until today, September 30, to sign or veto AB 2222, a bill that would pay local newsrooms a tax credit for every journalist they keep on payroll. Its backers call it the largest proposed public investment in local news in the country. The Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act, authored by Assemblymember Chris Ward with Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, passed the Senate 30 to 10 on August 30 and the Assembly 59 to 15 the next day. If it becomes law, the outlets with the most to gain are not the big metro papers. They are the small, in-language newsrooms that serve Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog and Spanish speaking Californians on budgets that rarely cover a full reporting staff.
A disclosure before going further: 88tumble is an independent Asian American outlet, and bills like this one shape the economics of publications like ours. We are writing about it because it matters to the communities we cover, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend to a distance we do not have.
What does AB 2222 actually do?
AB 2222 creates a refundable state tax credit for newsrooms that employ journalists in California, starting in tax year 2027. A qualifying outlet would receive $20,000 for each of its first five full time editorial positions, defined as at least 30 hours a week and at least $35,000 in annual pay. Each additional full time journalist earns $15,000. A newly created reporting position earns another $15,000 on top, and part time journalists count for $7,500 each.
Because the credit is refundable, an outlet that owes little or no tax receives the balance as a payment. That detail is the whole design. Most small newsrooms do not make enough profit to use an ordinary tax credit, and nonprofit newsrooms do not pay income tax at all. Rebuild Local News, the advocacy group that has pushed the policy nationally, gives a simple example: a nonprofit with three full time reporters would receive $60,000 a year, and hiring a fourth would raise that to $95,000.
The program would sunset after five years, covering tax years 2027 through 2031, with compliance reports to the Franchise Tax Board beginning in 2029. Rebuild Local News puts the cost at more than $40 million a year, paid for through a separate tax conformity measure that ends a California corporate deduction for executive compensation above $1 million.
Who qualifies
The bill is written for outlets with real roots in California. Digital publications need to publish at least monthly and draw at least a third of their audience from the state. Print publications qualify through court adjudication, a periodicals mailing permit, or California distribution. Broadcasters need an FCC license tied to a California community. Every outlet needs at least a year of operation in the state, a public corrections policy, media liability insurance, and public disclosure of its owners or board, and none can be controlled by a political action committee or a 501(c)(4).
Those rules matter for ethnic media in particular. Many in-language outlets are family owned, thinly staffed and older than the digital startups that dominate conversations about the future of news. A per journalist credit rewards exactly what they already do, which is keep a reporter covering a community nobody else covers, rather than asking them to win a competitive grant cycle.
Why this is an Asian American story
When a gunman killed 11 people at a dance studio in Monterey Park on Lunar New Year's Eve in 2023, much of the first reliable information reaching older Cantonese and Mandarin speaking residents did not come from official channels. In a guest column published by AsAmNews and American Community Media, Julian Do described Chinese and Vietnamese language journalists working through the night to translate police briefings and connect grieving families with services before in-language updates existed.
That is the case for AB 2222 in one night. In-language newsrooms function as civic infrastructure for immigrant communities, the place where elders learn about a rent program, a scam, a public health order or a shooting. They are also among the least financially stable outlets in the state. They have long relied on short term grants that cannot carry a payroll from one year to the next, which means the reporters serving the most linguistically isolated readers are often the easiest to lose.
A per journalist credit attacks that exact weakness. It does not care what an outlet covers or which language it publishes in. It pays for the job.
Who is backing it, and the argument against
The coalition behind the bill is broad. A joint letter urging Newsom to sign carried 134 news organizations and press associations, 94 of them based in California, alongside national media groups and labor unions including SAG-AFTRA and the NewsGuild. Ethnic media associations are part of that coalition.
The skeptical case deserves a hearing too. Critics of government support for journalism worry that public money, however it is structured, creates a relationship between newsrooms and the officials they cover. Supporters answer that a tax credit tied to headcount, with no review of content, is about as arm's length as public support gets, and that the alternative is a state where large parts of the population have no local reporting at all. A new program costing more than $40 million a year also gives the governor a fiscal reason to hesitate if he wants one.
What happens next
If Newsom signs, the credit opens in tax year 2027, and California joins the small group of states experimenting with payroll support for journalism at a scale none of them has tried. If he vetoes, supporters are expected to try again next session.
Either way, the question the bill raises will not go away. Communities that read the news in Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean or Tagalog depend on a handful of reporters who are paid very little, and the country has never settled whether keeping those reporters employed is anyone's job but their publishers'. AB 2222 is California's answer. By tonight, we will know whether the governor agrees.
