⁍ Google scrapes the web to get headlines and story snippets, while Facebook features content posted by publishers or users.

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⁍ Report said U.S. newspapers would most likely cut at least 7,000 employees in 2020, leaving only about 30,000 newsroom jobs.

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⁍ By the end of 2020, total U.S. newspaper revenue is expected to have dropped by about 70% since 2005, while newsroom employment has fallen by 59%.

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– “Local news has been hijacked by a few large news aggregation platforms, most notably Google and Facebook, which have become the dominant players in online advertising,” says a new report from Sen. Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, per Reuters. The report points to “trillion-dollar companies scrape local news content and data for their own sites and leverage their market dominance to force local news to accept little to nothing for their intellectual property.” Google and Facebook “control 77% of locally-focused digital advertising revenue,” says the report, which calls for new powers for the Federal Trade Commission “to protect the struggling US local news industry from unfair competition from large technology companies.” The report notes that US newspapers’ revenue is expected to have dropped by about 70% since 2005, while newsroom employment is expected to have fallen by 59%. Cantwell tells Reuters that “beyond just making sure that they live to fight another day … Congress must address ‘unfair competition’ facing local news outlets that ‘hold governments accountable’ and provide other services. We don’t want to lose that in the digital transformation.” A bill is pending in Congress that would give news publishers a four-year safe harbor to negotiate with Facebook, Google, and other platforms collecting the bulk online advertising revenue.