(C) Common Dreams
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Policy case study: the impact of digital platforms paying for news in Australia [1]
['Rhodri Davies', 'Writer-In-Residence', 'Mfc Secretariat']
Date: 2024-09
In March 2021, Australia introduced its News Media Bargaining Code – a world-first piece of legislation that sought to ensure that “news media businesses are fairly remunerated for the content they generate, helping to sustain public interest journalism in Australia.”
The competition regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), had proposed the code in the face of news companies’ ever dwindling revenues.
Today, similar codes are being discussed or introduced around the world, including in other MFC member countries – most recently in Canada. Meanwhile Indonesia is drafting a code, the EU adopted a copyright law in 2019 forcing platforms to pay for news content, and there have been legislative talks, official discussions and campaigns for codes in Brazil, India, South Africa and California.
The struggle to remain financially viable is one of the key media freedom challenges across the world. So now is a good time to ask – what has been learned from the Australian experience? And has the code provided benefits to news organisations there – including small publishers, whose business models are especially vulnerable to the migration of audiences to digital?
“Bedrock to remain sustainable”
According to a review of the first year of the code, commissioned by the Australian government, the impact so far has been positive. The final report of the Australian Treasury’s statutory review into the News Media Bargaining Code, released by the Albanese government in December 2022, said that “it is reasonable to conclude that the Code has been a success to date.”
The report recognized that some news businesses had not secured deals with Meta and/or Google; however, it also said that “over 30 commercial agreements had been struck, agreements that were highly unlikely to have been made without the Code. On the evidence available to the review, at least some of these agreements have enabled news businesses to, in particular, employ additional journalists and make other valuable investments to assist their operations.”
Chris Gogos is the Director and Publisher of Neos Kosmos, a leading Greek community newspaper and website with 85,000 print and 350,000 online monthly readers. He says the code “is a benefit to us no doubt.”
He says that while “the sustainability of hiring, maintaining and even growing our journalist pool is still very uncertain, the deal does provide us with a small buffer”. The firm has not made any redundancies in the past year and has been able to begin expanding its user payment model.
“It’s definitely helping us create the bedrock to remain sustainable,” Mr Gogos says.
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[1] Url:
https://mediafreedomcoalition.org/news/2023/bargaining-codes-what-benefits/
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