Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, D-New York City, is pictured speaking at a news conference last week in Albany.

Legislation has been introduced to expand the state’s journalism jobs tax credit to include non-profit corporations, public television or radio corporations.

Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, D-New York City, recently introduced legislation (S.6756) that would expand on legislation he sponsored in 2024 that creates a $30 million per year program for three years allowing eligible newspaper and broadcast businesses to receive a 50% refundable tax credit against the first $50,000 of an employee’s salary, up to a total of $300,000 per business. The Local Journalism Act included $4 million to incentivize print and broadcast businesses to hire new journalists. The remaining $26 million will be split evenly between businesses with fewer than 100 employees and those with more than 100 employees, ensuring that hyperlocal, independent news organizations have a fair shot at access to the state money.

After stalling for years, the Local Journalism Sustainability Act moved in the legislature in 2024 after the early-2024 founding of the Empire State Local News Coalition and the coalition’s mobilization of support from hundreds of New York hometown papers as well as a broad range stakeholders from around the country, including the Rebuild Local News Coalition, Microsoft, and El Diario. Organized labor including NYS AFL-CIO, CWA District 1, and national and local news guilds also played a role in mobilizing support for the bill. New York is the first state in the country to pass such a journalism jobs tax credit program.

State Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay, signed on as a co-sponsor of the 2024 legislation in the state Senate.

Hoylman-Sigal’s update to the legislation would expand the tax credit to non-profit news outlets, with the bill’s text specifically including public television and public radio.

“This bill clarifies that nonprofit corporations and public television or radio corporations are eligible to access the tax credit created under the act,” Hoylman-Sigal wrote. “Nonprofit journalism entities must be explicitly included in the program to ensure the program truly sustains the journalistic ecosystem. Public interest journalism depends on equitable access to this financial support. The effective date for the legislation is the same as the effective date of the Local Journalism Sustainability Act in an effort to maintain parity between news outlets.”

In a post on X, Hoylman-Sigal said he also fought to get an additional $8 million for NPR in the state Senate one-house budget and is working to get the money included in the state budget as negotiations come down to the wire on the state spending plan.

Hoylman-Sigal’s expansion of the Local Journalism Act comes at a time when funding for NPR and PBS is under increasing scrutiny from federal lawmakers. A House Republican pushing the Trump administration’s government efficiency efforts called for dismantling and defunding the nation’s public broadcasting system following a contentious hearing last week featuring the heads of PBS and NPR, according to the Associated Press. That hearing, coupled with President Donald Trump’s declaration that he would “love to” see federal funding cut off, the nation’s public broadcasting system is facing perhaps the biggest threat to its existence since it was first established in 1967, according to the AP. The AP reports NPR and PBS get roughly half a billion dollars in public money through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

“We believe that you all can hate us on your own dime,” said Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene during last week’s hearing, according to the AP.

Democrats characterized the hearing as a distraction from more important issues, like this week’s revelation that a journalist from the Atlantic was included in a text chain of Trump administration officials detailing a U.S. military strike in Yemen.

“If shame was still a thing, this hearing would be shameful,” said Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch, according to AP reports.

Uri Berliner, a former NPR editor who quit last year after complaining the news outlet had become too one-sided, wrote in the Free Press on Wednesday that NPR should no longer accept taxpayer money so it can “drop the public from its mission statement and embrace the progressive.”

“Don’t try to conceal what everyone knows already,” he wrote, according to the AP.

NPR President Katherine Maher said the radio network was wrong to dismiss what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop as a non-story. After they were repeatedly referenced by Republicans on the committee, Maher said she regretted posting some anti-Trump tweets before she began working for NPR, according to an AP report on last weeks’ hearing.

Although saying she is not responsible for editorial content, Maher detailed efforts by NPR to ensure a variety of political viewpoints are represented. NPR’s weekly listenership declined from 60 million to 42 million between 2020 and 2024, according to internal documents published by The New York Times, although Maher said Wednesday those numbers have inched up in the past year.