Can Australia save journalism?
By: Eliz Mizon
Tags: Journalism, News, Digital Life, Media, Society

Can Australia save journalism?

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

The journalism industry is in financial crisis. More news is consumed than ever before, and yet the last two decades have seen steady cuts and job losses from even the biggest international news outlets. The digital revolution that was supposed to ‘democratise’ the media industry has ended up destabilising and demonetising production, devastating public-interest journalism, and, ironically, global democracies.

But today could spark the beginning of a new era. On Dec 9 the Australian government introduces into law its ‘news media bargaining code’, a product of negotiations conducted since August.

Where did the money go?

The crux of the financial issue is the huge shift in the placement of advertising revenue. Big Tech companies — specifically Facebook and Google — have become the world’s information gatekeepers and, as a result, the recipient of more advertising dollars than all news outlets combined.

As local newspapers become an endangered species, and surviving news outlets ever more conglomerated, anxious discussion among media folk about how the industry will survive came to a head in 2020 as COVID-19 deepened the existing crisis to an ‘extinction-level event’ (shout-out to all my Deep Impact fam! — Ed.)

The code, developed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), intends to give news outlets bargaining power with the tech giants.

The main question is: given the way the chips have fallen, should Facebook and Google pay publishers to distribute their news content on the platforms? But wider questions concerning democracy, civility, and the public good also hang in the balance, as a result of the immense power Big Tech companies now hold.

Who is helping whom?

News outlets claim that easy access to a wide range of news content is one of the main drivers for users accessing platforms such as Facebook and Google — and that the companies don’t pay them enough as a result. Facebook and Google claim that they are giving ‘exposure’ to news outlets.

The platforms have fought the potential imposition, arguing that their impact on news organisations’ revenue has been ‘negligible.’ Looking at the figures, their lawyers’ definition of ‘negligible’ is suspect. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Facebook are the 4th and 6th most valuable companies in the world, respectively (by market cap):

“…for every $100 of online advertising spend, $53 goes to Google, $28 to Facebook and $19 to everyone else. […] Google made $4.3bn in advertising revenue in Australia last year and Facebook made $0.7bn, according to documents filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.”

At the last minute, the Australian government has recognised the “two-way value exchange” between Facebook, Google, and the news outlets, inserting a clause that requires any negotiation to acknowledge it also. Critics have accused them of watering down the bill at the last minute before it was placed before Parliament; former Nine Entertainment Co chief executive Hugh Marks said:

“We didn’t know that the government was going to go this way until they lobbed the legislation into the parliament, […] I really strongly object to lobbing at the last minute a value exchange in an arbitration process where there’s already a commercial process to determine the value.”

What does the code say?

The code ensures that:

News outlets can negotiate with Google and Facebook over any issue related to their news being hosted on the platforms

If an agreement can’t be reached within 3 months, an independent arbitrator will make a decision for them

The platforms will give news outlets 28 days notice of any algorithmic changes that would affect the placement of or audience interaction with their stories

The platforms will acknowledge original reporting, to differentiate it from copies, summaries, or other ‘churns’

The platforms will provide news outlets with explanations of how they use news audience data

The platforms will allow news outlets to control comments underneath their stories

The platforms will allow news outlets to prevent their stories being included on any given platform (assuming they’re a company large enough to be included in the legislation)

Facebook and Google have been ‘alerting’ users to the fact that their services might be ‘necessarily disrupted’ if the law passes. Press Gazette has called this behaviour ‘gaslighting’.

The Australian government had tasked the ACCC with examining the power imbalance between news outlets and Big Tech in 2019. As a result, the ACCC developed a ‘voluntary’ code of conduct — but the government wasn’t satisfied the tech companies would meet it. So they developed a mandatory code. The Sydney Morning Herald explains that

“Around this time, users of Facebook and Instagram noticed unusual alerts flagging updated terms of service that allowed the platforms to remove content to avoid “adverse legal or regulatory impacts”. On Google Search and YouTube, Australians have been told their free access to the services is “at risk”.”

Even the former head of Facebook in Australia has thrown his weight behind the code, saying that the company is clearly making noise as a “negotiating tactic”, threatening “the bad things that could happen” if they don’t get what they want.

As Canada takes up the same charge, the world — or, at least, those of us who spend way too much time on the internet — will be watching with bated breath to see if the code will assist Australia’s news industry. And by extension, the rest of the world’s, too.