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Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, had Matt Pearce sweating. Until the day before the signing deadline, Pearce didn’t know if the biggest piece of legislation he had ever worked on—one that creates a new standard for content-neutral government funding of local news—would become law or not.

And then, on September 30, Newsom signed the bill, establishing a groundbreaking precedent for state support of local outlets. Soon, newsrooms will get a twenty-thousand-dollar tax credit every year for each of their first five journalists, plus fifteen thousand more for each journalist after that. If a newsroom opens a new position, that will bring in another fifteen thousand on top of the base credit.…