Wyatt Emmerich, the long-time owner of The Era-Leader and more than 20 other small-town newspapers and websites, discussed his pending lawsuits against technology companies as well as the recent dustup involving his paper in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Speaking Wednesday to the McComb Rotary Club, Emmerich said newspaper owners recognized how the internet could change their business. But they missed a key point.
“What I didn’t see is how Big Tech could use economies of scale to monopolize advertising,” he said. “Their advantage is not putting stuff on the website. Their advantage is that they are the biggest spy network in the history of the world.”
He said tapping phones used to be illegal, but “now Google and Facebook track you all the time.”
Emmerich is one of two plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of breaking anti-trust laws. He said the case will be heard by the same judge that last year ruled that Google had become an illegal monopoly for internet advertising.
The class-action lawsuit is on hold, with the judge wrapping up the monopoly case. He is expected to order a breakup of Google.
Emmerich’s company is a plaintiff in two other lawsuits, both in federal court in Jackson, Mississippi, accusing defendants of copyright violations by stealing stories for internet use.
One is against the Newsbreak app, which he said is “the number-one content aggregator in the United States.”
The suit alleges the app stole thousands of stories from Emmerich’s websites and put them on its own site.
“I’ll bet 20% of you have the Newsbreak app on your phone and didn’t know that the Chinese Communist Party is tracking you,” he remarked at the Rotary meeting.
The other lawsuit is against a Japanese company for similar copyright violation claims.
Emmerich said one third of America's newspapers have closed in the past 10 years, and half of those that remain could be forced to close in the next five years.
He believes one solution is to require internet companies to pay royalties to content producers like newspapers, similar to what musicians get when people use a website to listen to songs.
The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill pending in Congress, would set up such a system. Canada and Australia already have started requiring royalties.
“We’re just trying to do the nuts and bolts of local reporting, and that needs to be done,” Emmerich said.
Without local reporting, “The reality is, you’re going to pay for that even more,” he added, through higher local taxes and wasted money.
As for the Clarksdale case, a dispute between city officials and the local newspaper went public when the city got a judge to issue a temporary restraining order that forced the paper to remove an opinion piece from its website.
The restraining order got wide attention. “All of a sudden, I was in the middle of a national controversy over the First Amendment,” Emmerich said, referring to constitutional free speech guarantees.
“There was nothing factually wrong with the editorial,” he said. “It was an opinion, an editorial. To get a restraining order for that is unheard of.”
The editorial criticized the city’s failure to notify the Clarksdale Press Register of a board meeting, as well as changing its proposed uses for a new tax. The city filed a defamation lawsuit, and the judge issued the restraining order without hearing the newspaper’s side.
“There were so many problems with that lawsuit, it’s hard to know where to begin,” Emmerich said. For one thing, it wasn’t filed in Coahoma County, where Clarksdale and the Press Register are located.
Also, he said, a government cannot be defamed.
The city dropped the lawsuit after a few days of national attention.
“It was great to see all these First Amendment warriors out there, rallying around us,” Emmerich said.
