Reminder: Arkansas Press Women scholarship deadline is Saturday

Saturday, April 1 is the deadline for applications to the 2023 Arkansas Press Women scholarship contest.

Arkansas Press Women, an affiliate organization of the National Federation of Press Women serving Arkansas communicators and media professionals, awards a $1,000 scholarship each spring to an undergraduate junior or senior student who is majoring in journalism or mass communications at an Arkansas college or university.

Funding for this scholarship comes from APW’s Maudine Sanders Education Fund. Maudine Sanders, who died in 2011 at age 87, was a previous owner of the Springdale Morning News and a long-time member and past president of Arkansas Press Women.

Visit https://bit.ly/3wIxGI6 to apply. For more information, email Angie Faller, scholarship chair, at amfaller@ualr.edu.

News/Media Alliance applauds California State Assembly for California Journalism Preservation Act

The News/Media Alliance made a statement applauding California State Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) for introducing the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA, AB 886), which would require Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Google to pay news publishers a “journalism usage fee” to use local news content, on Tuesday, March 21.

• Promote the welfare of the community newspaper industry.

• Fund legislative efforts to protect transparency in state government.

• Cultivate educational opportunities for future journalists.

• Ensure the viability of the newspaper industry for years to come.

To donate, mail a check to: Arkansas Newspaper Foundation 411 South Victory Street Little Rock, AR 72201

“These dominant digital ad companies are enriching their own platforms with local news content without adequately compensating the originators,” Wicks said. “It’s time they start paying market value for the journalism they are aggregating at no cost from local media.”

According to the Alliance, creators of quality journalism are currently not adequately compensated for the use of their content that takes a tremendous investment to produce, and therefore, cannot reinvest enough in journalists and newsrooms. The CJPA would promote the hiring of more journalists, requiring news publishers to invest 70 percent of the profits from the usage fee into journalism jobs.

In response to the bill’s introduction, News/Media Alliance Executive Vice President & General Counsel Danielle Coffey said, “We applaud California Assemblymember Wicks for introducing this legislation and for recognizing the critical importance of high-quality journalism to ensuring informed and engaged communities. We hope Congress takes note and follows suit by reintroducing legislation at the federal level as well to give news publishers across the U.S. the same ability to be fairly compensated by the dominant tech platforms.”

The Alliance has been vocally advocating for such legislation at the federal level since 2018. A federal version of the JCPA, previously reintroduced in the 117th Congress (S. 673 and H.R. 1735), successfully passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2022. The bill nearly passed into law in December. At that time, Meta threatened to remove news from in the U.S. if the JCPA passed, further demonstrating their outsized power.

For more information on the federal JCPA, visit www.JCPABill.com