Good morning from Columbus, Ohio, where I’m about to deliver a keynote at the Society of Professional Journalists’ annual conference. Here are some of the topics I’ll be talking about…

This week’s most important bit of news-about-the-news might have come out of Sacramento.

On Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Community NEWS Act into law. The act will create refundable tax credits for local news sources in the state “based on the number of journalists they employ,” the LAT’s Hannah Fry and Dakota Smith wrote, calling it “an innovative yet controversial attempt to slow the decline of local journalism.”

Advocates like Steven Waldman, founder and president of Rebuild Local News, which sponsored the legislation, linked up with a broad coalition to get the bill passed and signed into law this fall.

“This is the largest state effort to revive community news in the country, probably ever,” Waldman told me. “We also hope it serves as a model for other states.”

And that does seem likely. Matt Pearce, a former LAT reporter who now works with Waldman, told me, “We’ve already heard from advocates in a couple of other states that are interested in pursuing similar policies in 2027.”

Pearce said “this is probably the most popular policy right now to drive public investment into local news without causing press freedom risks, with California, Illinois, New Mexico and New York enacting their own versions since 2024.”

Pearce wrote about the “California roadmap” on his Substack here. And Waldman explained how it works in this column for Poynter.

“The incentives are right: Hire more reporters, get a match from the state. Shrink your newsroom, get fewer benefits,” he wrote.

Newsom called it a “big deal” during the signing ceremony on Wednesday. And it’s tempting to note the contrast: While President Trump bashes the press and tries to ban media outlets, one of the Democrats with 2028 aspirations enacted a law that’s meant to help save local news.

But Waldman emphasized in his column that this policy is not “politically slanted.” Stations owned by Fox and Sinclair will benefit by employing local journalists.

“Public policy support should focus on one thing — whether they’re doing real local civic journalism, without judgment about ideology,” he wrote. “It is why we regularly compare this to the Postal Subsidy of 1792, which provided cheap postage rights for newspapers, whether they supported the Federalists or the Jeffersonians. Hamilton and Jefferson were okay with that. We should be too.”

The combined Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery will be named Skydance. CEO David Ellison joined X and announced the name there this morning.

As some of you already know, Skydance is the name of the production company that Ellison founded twenty years ago. When he took control of Paramount last year, he renamed that company Paramount Skydance.

The name originally came from “David’s love of aviation,” the production company’s website says. “An accomplished pilot, he took inspiration from flying aerobatics known as ‘skydancing’ – giving his new company a name to evoke limitless possibilities.”

With this corporate renaming, “we never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one,” Ellison wrote on X. “Instead, we wanted a name that would give the combined company an identity of its own while allowing Paramount and Warner Bros. — and all our extraordinary brands — to remain in the spotlight.”