Daily Business Report: Monday, March 10th, 2025
Study tells California legislators to declare war on red tape — but will they?
By Dan Walters | CalMatters
Construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and its more famous cousin, the Golden Gate Bridge, began in 1933, and both were carrying traffic by 1937.
The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake severely damaged the Bay Bridge, leading to a decision to replace its eastern section rather than merely repair or refit it.
However state and local politicians argued for more than a decade over design of the new section and how to pay for it. Construction finally began in 2002 and was finished 11 years later — nearly four times as long as the entire bridge took — at a cost of $6.5 billion, the costliest public works project in California history.
The Bay Bridge saga exemplifies how California, which once taught the world how to build things, lost its mojo by erecting so many political, legal and financial hurdles to getting things done.
College athletes can now make millions off sponsorship deals. Here’s the first look at California’s numbers
By Adam Echelman & Erica Yee | CalMatters
$390,000 to Jaylon Tyson, a former basketball guard at UC Berkeley, from a group of private donors.
$3,000 to Jordan Chiles, a UCLA gymnast and Olympic gold-medal winner, from Grammarly, an AI writing company.
$390 to Mekhi Mays, a former Cal State Long Beach sprinter, from a local barbecue joint.
These payments — derived from data that public universities provided to CalMatters — were part of “name, image and likeness deals” requiring students to create favorable posts on social media.
Such sponsorship deals were unheard of just four years ago. In 2021, California enacted a law allowing athletes to make these kinds of brand deals. It was the first state to pass such a law, prompting similar changes across the country.
The L.A. Times adds AI-generated counterpoints to its opinion pieces and guess what, there are problems
By Laura Hazard Owen | Nieman Labs
Billionaire newspaper owners are in the middle of a massive freakout about their Opinion sections during the second Trump administration.
Last week, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that the Post’s Opinion section would reorient itself “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets…Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” This followed Bezos’s late-October decisionthat the Post would stop endorsing presidential candidates.
And this week, Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of The Los Angeles Times, announced that the paper has added AI-powered “alternative perspectives” — dubbed “Insights” — to much of its opinion content. (The Opinion section is also being rebranded as “Voices,” and anywhere in the paper that “a piece takes a stance or is written from a personal perspective, it may be labeled Voices.”)
“The purpose of Insights is to offer readers an instantly accessible way to see a wide range of different AI-enabled perspectives alongside the positions presented in the article,” Soon-Shiong wrote on Monday in a letter to readers.
