Right now, Australia’s news media dinosaurs are standing on the cliffs of the Yucatan Peninsula roaring out to the government to come — come quick! — to rescue them from the impact of the COVID-19 meteor.
They’re not alone. Around the world, once proudly independent media are calling for — and gratefully accepting — government rescue from this threatened extinction event.
Governments are keen to help. But they should forget propping up the old ad-supported business models. Here’s an opportunity to remake the journalism that Australia needs.
Just how big is this metaphorical meteor? Let’s look at what we know about the impact on advertising, still the major funding for commercial media. According to the Standard Media Index, April ad spend is expected to be down 30% (compared to April last year), after dropping 10.6% in March. Nine confirmed last week that its April broadcast revenues were down 29.8%. Expect worse in May.
As the original dinosaurs discovered 66 million years ago, meteors like this don’t bounce. They crash.
The COVID-19 shock is accelerating a long-term trend. Here’s how cruel April was: it was also the 19th consecutive month where ad spend was down. As we get to the other side, advertisers look like they’ll be spending maybe $1 billion less in traditional media AC (after-COVID) than they were before.
As Crikey has been reporting, extinction is likely to come first to media channels that were already on the edge: printed papers (particularly regional papers), magazines and pay TV — as News Corp all but confirmed with its $1.5 billion write down in Foxtel’s value on Friday.
The losers look like being what were once the down-stream winners: screen production, professional sport — and journalism.
Governments are fiddling around the edges as much to be seen to be helping as to buy time.
They’re buying up the empty ad spaces. In the UK, Digiday reports, the government is now the most important client for news publishers with a $68 million dollar advertising partnership (unironically dubbed “all in, all together”) launched in mid-April, including near-identical wrap-arounds and web site promotions.
In Victoria, the Andrews government has committed $4.7 million in “emergency support” through ads in regional newspapers. The federal government’s $30 million information campaign is ramping up around the COVIDSafe app. Clive Palmer is taking advantage of media eagerness for ad dollars, no matter how yellow.
Both Australia and New Zealand are rebating or waiving broadcaster fees, at a saving to the corporations of $41 million in Australia (for spectrum access) and about $19 million in New Zealand (for transmission).
The bigger the dinosaur, the greatest the pressure to evolve — quickly — into something smaller by encouraging regulators to get out of the way.
News Corp, having suspended printing of its suburban newspapers and selling its US inserts business News America Marketing, is now in talks to sell off their Australian regional papers to Australian Community Newspapers.
Nine is trying to sell its New Zealand subsidiary Stuff to a local buyer. (This morning, its major competitor NZME has advised the stock exchange that it has again asked the country’s competition authority to waive objections to it buying Stuff. It reportedly wishes to buy it for $1. Nine is no longer interested in selling to NZME.)
In most countries, media corporations have taken advantage of eligibility for wage support. Here, Seven West Media has been the largest media applicant for JobKeeper, while foreign-owned media have been reluctant to declare the necessary global figures to justify the downturn. The privately-owned Bauer, for example, has accepted German government support for its home-town employees, but has not agreed to open up its head office books to justify support in Australia.
In the United States, media access to the Small Business Paycheck Protection Program has been both limited and controversial. Most traditional media including broadcasters and most newspapers are ineligible. New media Axios first accepted and then, under pressure, returned the money.
A handful of countries have introduced news-media specific grants, such as Australia’s proposed $50 million Public Interest News Gathering Fund for regional media.
Austria, for example, has begun direct funding to mastheads based on circulation and readership, although the model has been criticised for encouraging sensationalism. New Zealand has proposed expanding its Local Democracy Reporting pilot and set aside about $10 million “for specific targeted assistance to companies as and when needed”.
Governments have freed up media from their obligations to support content creators. In Australia, the government has “suspended” the broadcast Australian content rules for drama, documentaries and children’s television. In New Zealand, the broadcasters’ contributions to support local production through the NZ On Air fund have been cut 80%, saving the networks about $15.5 million.
But is a Jurassic Park for old media really what’s best for our democracy? Its trickle-down economics, with journalists and other creative workers at the end of the drip. To revitalise the news ecosystem, governments need to be thinking about supporting journalism, not old business models.
Can the media survive in a post-pandemic world? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s new Your Say section.
Prop them up, why? So Murdoch & Stokes can have more opportunities to privately debate whether to cull an elected Prime Minister or not?
Scotty from Marketing may smugly imagine he can buy protection but it didn’t work for Turnbull despite him changing the media ownership laws to curry favour with Murdoch et al in 2017. Within 12 months Turnbull was history.
The world doesn’t owe Murdoch, Stokes, or any of their distorted and corrupted ilk, a living – it’s time for the bill.
It’s a figurative ‘meteorite,’ not ‘meteor.’ Meteors don’t reach the ground. And if the printed media were figuratively ‘Jurassic,’ then they’d be in good health. The dinosaurs didn’t go extinct till the end of the Cretaceous.
Commercial tv is standing on the cliff face screaming help or I`ll jump, how about a big push over the cliff, that would help, sack the redneck journos and shock jocks and throw them onto the welfare they bag incessantly when others need it, let the bastards starve on $40 a day like everyone else is forced to do and the rest of us just sit back and hope the virus gets Murdoch sooner than later, if that happens I`ll know there is a god.
Step 1: Government buys AAP and creates an independent department of the ABC to run it.
The penny is finally dropping. It’s finally beginning to dawn on Journalism that – in its current form – not only ‘can’t’ it survive…but it shouldn’t. Should not survive. Needs to die. Must die. It’s certainly what I think, have been saying for nearly twenty years…and now, that Murdoch in particular is spiraling completely off reservation, with Fairfax already a plaything of the corporate boardroom, and the ABC being simultaneously spliced and diced, and what bits remaining bunkering evermore arrogantly into an ID politics/ideological siege mentality…who on earth would trust a legacy journalist to provide anything much but decadent exit muzak for a dying vocation?
This was always coming. The internet was always going to be a vocational murder weapon, Journalism’s obituary was the first thing ever written online. It’s an absurd, farcical, non-profession. It came about – briefly – purely thanks to the historical contemporaneousness of mass printing and free-to-air terrestrial broadcast, mass consumption and advertising. Now that the commercial meeja containers that this gave rise to (papers, mags, radio and TV shows) are no longer viable, ‘Professional Journalism’ – literate people paid to knock about the joint, watch the world, and write descriptions of it for a mass audience – simply isn’t viable. (You can understand why ‘Professional Journalists’ are fighting their own demise hard, can’t you. What a bloody cool way to make a living, huh. You and me – dumb old Teh InterWebz commenters – do it for nuthin’! And don’t even start me on Professional Meeja Opinion Makers…!)
Well…so what? The truth is that there is no universal information ‘law’ that says ‘Professional Journalism’ is a ‘net good’ for democracy, public debate, civil discourse and engagement, enlightenment progress. Look around (starting with FoxNews, say – oh yes, ‘Professional Journalism’, too). Pro Journos can write and broadcast and holler and stamp their little feet until they’re blue in the face, but the vast majority of literate, engaged people in the world really consume very little. And no-one needs to consume any at all, now. Not really. If you’re the kind of person who isn’t really interested in the world outside your world – most people, in truth – then all the journalism in the world won’t change that. And if you’re the kind of person who is, then…you don’t need Professional Journalists, either (except for occasional pleasure, and to flatter your established certitudes). ‘Journalism’ doesn’t change anyone’s mind. As for reportage? Ha – is there any left? And besides, I can find out more about my world by going direct to source myself – Hansard, academic, corporate, community, protest groups, niche interest, public service, social media, scientific, technical…the rich array of information available at my fingertips now is a cornucopia. No wonder the pro’s hate Teh Webz so much. Who needs an information ‘middleman’ inserted between me and the world anymore? Especially one that will very likely get stuff wrong, or miss out bits, or not tell me important bits for various reasons, or push a particular angle down my throat…and come draped with all sorts of junk, flotsam, baggage, noise and dreck, to boot?
So I know it’s harsh, I know it’s unfair some very good journalists, and I know it will get me consigned to the strawman fringes of The ConSpirasee InterWebz as usual….but I find myself welcoming the onrushing death of this epistemological con-job. Journalism is Dying. Hooray. Hooray. Hooray.
Public information will be immeasurably better off for it, on balance.
Jack …that was wonderful….I gave up on reading newspapers in 1996 when I shifted to a small town & needed them ..They were dying compost well before the Net came along .
Guess what, the net relies on advertising too… Or do you trust what’s put up there for free? Be honest now..
Quite a few of the non-newspapers source of information I rely on (podcasts, newsletters) have starting begging for readers support and are now constantly reminding us that “Covid times are tough.”The first expense any company cuts back on in a recession is advertising, and to be brutal about it – there will not be many survivors in the coming media apocalypse.
Hasn’t anyone noticed that Crikey has already made cutbacks and is desperately discounting its own paywall? It needs ad dollars too, and it’ totally reliant on the discretionary income of customers who are are about to have their pensions and income sources decimated by the lockdown-induced recession.
Even Google has taken a revenue hit, believe it or not – though it and Facebook are probably too big to fail… But without the legacy media to provide them with free content, what’s left? Hansard? Corporate PR? Self interested misinformation? Good luck Jack. Love you work but personally, you’d be better off sticking to “wood chopping and butchering livestock” than relying on the net for anything useful.
Google & Facebook too big to fail? Look up the history of the mighty East India Company.
Did you mean the South Sea Bubble?
The East India Company didn’t fail, it was taken over by the British government following a small contretemp know as the First Independence War, aka the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857-59.
Not helped by bean counters using the cheapest possible grease for rifle cartridges which had to be bitten before insertion.
Probably tallow from mutton but the rumour was that it was a mix of pig & cow fat – excellent way to annoy both major religious groups which, until then, had been a case study in rubbing along together thanks to a disinterested uber authority.
Samuel Clemens, a journalist (when they were the knock about, observant types whom you described) wrote “those who don’t read newspapers might be uninformed but those who do read them are misinformed“.
It has been shown over & over, especially with FUX and NewsCorpse rags, that they who rely upon those organs are not simply ignorant but deliberately, with malice aforethought, consciously misled, indeed encouraged to be so.
That great humanitarian & all round good guy, William Randolph Hearst (is said to have) said “news is what someone doesn’t want made public, the rest is advertising“.