![]() In the words of one Sydney media executive, “It’s like a brown paper bag gets stuffed with money, is shoved across the table, and then the platforms can say, ‘Now just shut the fuck up.’” Croakey Health Media, a not-for-profit site that provides valuable information on covid and Indigenous medical issues, has gotten nothing from either company. SBS, one of Australia’s two major public broadcasters, got money from Google but was inexplicably shut out by Facebook. I’ve been talking to newsroom managers most of my adult life, and I’ve never seen a group so reticent to share details of anything related to their business-thanks to ironclad secrecy agreements insisted upon by the tech companies. If you want to learn whether newsrooms are spending that money to bolster journalism, rather than pad executives’ salaries, you’re out of luck. If you want to know how much money the platforms have paid to news organizations, you’re out of luck. But it’s a murky deal, with critical details guarded like they’re nuclear launch codes. In the US, Congress is looking for ways to make Google and Facebook pay for content, though legislation to support local journalism has stalled in Congress.Īustralia looks like a success story to those who’ve long yearned to force Big Tech to prop up suffering newsrooms. Canada and the United Kingdom are moving to enact similar codes, while officials in Indonesia and South Africa have voiced plans to do the same. and Alphabet Inc., respectively) are on the defensive as more countries consider their own versions of Australia’s approach. Now Facebook and Google (whose parent companies are Meta Platforms Inc. Monica Attard, a journalism professor in Sydney, says she can’t persuade many students to take internships these days because it’s so easy for them to land full-time jobs-and that change coincides with the gusher of code money: “I swear to God, I have not seen it like this in twenty years.” As a result, the public Australian Broadcasting Corporation can place at least fifty new journalists in underserved parts of the country, while the McPherson Media Group, which publishes such papers as the Yarrawonga Chronicle and the Deniliquin Pastoral Times, expects tech money to fund up to 30 percent of editorial salaries. The legislation, known as the News Media Bargaining Code, has enabled Australian news organizations to extract more than $200 million (almost $150 million US) in the year since it went into effect. Media companies, including Murdoch’s News Corp, helped persuade the Australian parliament to pass a law that is now compelling Facebook and Google to pay substantial sums-sometimes in the tens of millions of dollars-to news organizations whose headlines frequently appear on platforms’ pages. It took Murdoch more than a decade before he got his way with some of his online “friends”-not in the US, where he had become a citizen, but in his native Australia. And yet there are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production.” That goes for some of our friends online, too. He used the stage to rail against his digital competitors: “Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing. SYDNEY – More than a dozen years ago, the US Federal Trade Commission sponsored an ominously titled workshop, “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” The gathering included a number of dignitaries, but the marquee name was one familiar around the world: Rupert Murdoch.
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