Journalism is accustomed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, particularly over the past two decades. The latest blow comes from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta – owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp which has put journalism on notice. The deals it made in 2021 with Australian news media businesses worth tens of millions of dollars won’t be renewed. The social media giant has decided to abandon its Facebook News tab, for which a number of news media organisations produce content in return for the millions they receive. Meta says traffic to the tab has dropped to negligible levels which is probably true given it is not visible on Facebook home pages, or its menu page, nor on the Facebook app. It is, the sceptical might say, as though Meta was deliberately trying to hide it.
So, where to now?
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland and Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones have lashed out at Meta, accusing it of an “abrogation of responsibility” to its Australian users. Meta says the revenue Facebook generates from having news on the site, given low traffic to the Facebook News tab, is essentially not worth the deals it has made with news media organisations. Whilst referrals to news media sites will still occur, from news media ‘pages’ on Facebook, and users linking to news posts from their Facebook profiles, Meta has always argued it shouldn’t, outside these referrals, be doing anything to prop up news businesses. The deals were, as Professor Axel Bruns of QUT says, “...a bit like taking mining royalties to fund kindergartens.”
The government may have the option of designating Meta under the News Media Bargaining Code, the legislation in whose shadow the commercial deals were struck. Meta can succumb to the arbitration that would follow designation, or it could decide to withdraw from news altogether in Australia, as it did in Canada after it passed similar legislation designed to get the platforms to compensate news businesses for the content they used. Meta memorably withdrew news from Facebook in Australia in early 2021 and managed to achieve better terms for itself in the event it was forced into the arbitration process.
If Meta does exit news altogether, news media is going to be financially poorer, given the shadow deals (including those with Google) were estimated to be worth upward of $200m a year to the organisations which were successful, funding innumerable positions. But it also leaves journalism back where it was two decades ago, struggling to create sustainable business models. The three-year deals Meta struck were only band aid fixes to a deep structural problem that has again been laid bare – news in and of itself is not profitable and can’t pay for itself. In the commercial sphere, it was the advertising which paid for the journalism.
The moment has come for news to find a way out of the dilemma. The solutions are not easy to find but there’s no shortage of suggestions. Bernard Keane at Crikey argues it’s time for government to step up to support public interest journalism rather than force foreign owned multinationals “on a fictitious policy pretext” to submit themselves to a shake down. Anna Draffin at the Public Interest Journalism Initiative suggests government can help via the now under-consideration News Media Assistance Program and the diversity measurement framework, as well as more immediate measures such as a R&D style tax rebate to encourage commercial investment in news and the development of a not-for-profit news market. Finding a sustainable model is the holy grail of the information ecosystem – again, and this time, with a renewed sense of urgency!
Monica Attard, CMT Co-Director