As a general rule, journalism doesn’t do nuance. There is bad and good, black and white, heroes and villains. There are inherent flaws in being the first cut of history.
Crikey isn’t the font of all wisdom but it is wise enough to know that a) there’s always a story behind the story and b) sadly, there is often spin in front of it.
The debate about big tech and the proposed mandatory code to force Google and Facebook to pay for news is a case in point. There’s so much spin and so little nuance on all sides.
I don’t intend to rehearse all that here. Rather, let me cut to the chase: there is no doubt that big tech extends a powerful grip on the news media industry and there’s no doubt it should pay its fair share of taxes. It should also pay for the news it uses.
That’s why Private Media, the parent company of Crikey and SmartCompany, has signed up to Google’s News Showcase. It’s a licensing agreement. We do the content, they pay us to use it. No one is stealing anything. It’s a deal. A deal that the big publishers in the news media industry could presumably also do.
There’s so much nuance getting lost in the big tech v big media debate. For a start, what about the 100 or so small, independent, Australian-owned media outfits?
A key consideration should be protecting media diversity — diversity in all its forms.
In the meantime, Private Media has signed a licensing agreement and is open to any other company wishing to use our content. Give us a call. Journalism does have a price. Nothing is free. There should be a value exchange.
But there needs to be transparency and truth on all sides. And, if possible, a recognition of nuance.
Good on you Peter and Private Media for signing up to Googles News Showcase.
It is important that as many people get to hear ‘the other side’ of the story and be enlightened with some of the missing pieces of the puzzle.
I have been amused at the readers comments in the Australian to articles about the new media content bill. Some readers have been asking why they don’t have a clear understanding on what the beaf with Google was all about. I’m sure many readers of the Australian don’t realise News Corp was instrumental in the draft bill’s creation or they don’t understand how close our politicians are with News Corp.
It almost couldn’t have been more obvious the politician’s and News Corp are working hand in hand with the all overt positive coverage of Morrison along side stories about how bad Google and Facebook were in opposing the draft bill.
Anyway, thanks Crickey for providing the nuance and transparency.
How much of the cut do we comments box content-creators get, Frayso? I’ll take my slice of the Googley action by the yard, not the word, if that helps. This fight may well be about the Ruperts v. the Zuckerbergs, over which business model/information power leverage will prevail. But it’s at least as much about a more banal fight, too, at the grass-roots, Information Class content-creators level: the struggle to go on enjoying a sinecure, even as its viability fades, at least at golden age historical volumes. Namely, getting paid to write words, produce content, in a world increasingly overflowing with the free stuff. Much of it at least as good as any of the paid kind (*ahem lol*).
I do get it, Journalism. I really do, Mass Meeja. What a great gig, getting paid to….do this (*taps taps taps*)…yep, I wish I could get paid to write these words here, too. ‘For’ Crikey? ‘In’ Crikey? Or just…’here at’ Crikey? How about half a half a half a cent a *tap* of the Google News Showcase stash, Eric? We get it, Information Class. What a jolly gig. What a fabulous job. What a…Golden Age, indeed. Why wouldn’t you all want to keep it rolling, just a wee bit longer, in whatever jury-rigged improv form you can bodge up. Big Tech + Mass Meeja = a bit longer getting paid to do what the rest of do for nothing; as a tool only of and for doing something else. Lawyers write. Doctors write. Engineers, teachers, businessmen, tradesmen, nurses, farmers…FFS, everybody on the literate effing planet writes, right? It’s only writers who get paid to do nothing except…write.
So what did you expect to happen, when the whole world started to write for nothing?
As I’ve said many times, the modern mass meeja – ‘Journalism’ (whatever that even is) – has mostly just been a serendipitous trick of the business model. Much more than one of writerly market power or talent, anyway – much less ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘speaking truth to power’ (ha ha ha, eh, Rupes?!). The salient bit of ‘Mass Media’ is…’mass’. It was the various mass forms’ sheer appetite for words/content on a vast scale that made the golden age of journalism so golden. So many worthless words, paid for. So many writers who really couldn’t or shouldn’t, who did, and made a quid. And it always amazes me that no-one ever stopped to ask just how much damage it was doing to words and their meanings, to be producing so many meaningless words, all this time. I suppose, in Trump, we began to find out. Sadly, there’s no sign yet – so far as I can see – that anyone is recognising that only real way to restore meaning to words is for all the writers of sh*t meaningless ones to STFU. The Information Classes can do an awful lot of clever-clever things with content, but the one thing it can’t is…not produce it. Even if just every now and then. Paid writers gotta write, I guess. Especially those for whom mass media daily expression is a deeply enmeshed part of their existential DNA; who set out on their paid-wordy journey at the same time as their Golden Age forms…and who now remain araldited-in owners of those forms, at the top of the Boomer Meeja Biz Model tree. Even as cadets and freelancers alike get ripped off more grotesquely – asked to write for nothing, even pay to provide content – journalism’s Elder Caste keeps those $2/word, feature commission, weekly 400, Analysis Fodder, permanent tenure routines and structures and standards ring-fenced around their Bylines. Talk about pulling the wordy ladder up after you. KO, Boomers!!
Even they’ll die out in the end, of helpless over-production. It’s just supply and demand. Too many free words floating around for words ever again to pay as much, or as many. I really do hope, once the worst and last of those generational paid-word-hogs have finally taken their self-indulgent vocational victory laps – whether of the Cassidy/Ferguson/Jones taxpayer funded kind, or as great turgid slabs of subsidised private sector dreck, in the Paul Kelly Memorial Homes Of Indulgent Culture War Waffle – that the best younger writers do, yep, work out a sustainable new media biz model for the internet era. One that, yes, does allow the genuine quality words, the words of real wordy talent, to earn a living – whether creative, journalistic, analytical, funny, illuminating, poetic, courageous words. Co-ops, Patreon, hubs…rattle jars…maybe the Google News Showcase IS it, and I wish Crikey well. I have always said your subscriptions are way tooo low. I’d pay $500 a year for the privilege of rabbiting on like this, for starters.
And I wish all currently paid writers – still, just – nothing but well, too. It’s a glorious thing to be paid for your words – your originality, your wit, your invention, your dash and verve and boldness. But it’s a very, very tough gig to finesse, too, one I never managed to crack. I get paid to write, of course I do. It’s just that – as for most of us – the paid writing for work I do is to do work on more than…the paid writing I do. Only the most talented writers can get paid to write, and the stats on talent haven’t changed in ten thousand years. All that has is the business model. Now that the golden age’s peak has been crested, the number of us paid to write, to produce content…can only diminish again. No matter how we dice and re-dice the business model. Supply and demand. If that makes words – content – sound too much like a fungible commodity…well, most mass meeja journalism was exactly that. Form, not content. Macluhanite medium, not message. Template, not truth.
Jonathon Pie, reading out the phone book in the right cadence and pitch, making it the BBC nightly news.
Journalism – the business model, not the vocation – is dying. Hooray. Hooray. Oh, hooray. ‘Coz it doesn’t take 1000 paid journalists to tell the truth to power. It just takes one good one. Where they write it doesn’t matter.
Bravo Jack, have another 2 cents from me.
The real grift is that journalists were paid so much, and there were so many, when there were rivers of gold. It was useful, one could soon discern the good ones from the bad, and eventually work out why they were good, and what they did and how they did it. Unfortunately the SMH/Age, which used to be a factory for good writers has got rid of nearly all of them.
But yeah, the old model is broken, and Rupert wants to glue it back together again. I want google and Facebook to pay some real taxes, you thieving creeps, but not to Murdoch or the LNP Bugler, such has the SMH become.
I only come here for the comments. Err, well, not all the comments.
Well said Dogs Breakfast, I also want Murdoch, FB and Google to pay some taxes in Australia
Maybe the tax office can garnishee whatever money Google gives News as an advance on the tax the Murdoch media should be paying.
A Tobin tax, on turnover alone, would pay for Covid 2020 disbursements.
Imagine what infrastructure that could fund (when/if we ever return to ‘normal’) … if it wasn’t repurposed to maaates.
I had to stop for a coffee midway, pondering as the kettle boiled, before returning to the trek.
Nice name check of the forgotten (and generally not understood) McLuhan – he could not have conceived, in his fevered catholic convert nightmares, of what currently passes for public discourse.
As Allen Woody did not suggest (Annie Hall), the massage is the message… or is it tuther way ’round?
How could one tell when homogeneity and canx wokeizms have, like a suffocating comfort blanket, on those stoopid enough to cry “Up to a point, Lord Copper”?
Seriously, look at the word flood threatening, as intended, to drown or obscure conscious thought (successfully? – discuss) – how many of those would/could anyone grasp were they drowning in a cesspool of mendacity?
Precious few, to vanishing point, I would suggest.
I like to think that I for one at least am pulling my weight in the aggregating word-flood hard yards, Aggers :-).
Hope all well, m’friend.
Ta, same to you. All good here.
I want a big, cheap, long lasting battery, ASAP!
Looks like I can comment here now. So copied from the other article.
“there is no doubt that big tech extends a powerful grip on the news media industry and there’s no doubt it should pay its fair share of taxes. It should also pay for the news it uses.”
The only part of this that is true is “it should pay its fair share of taxes”. The rest is utter BS.
I don’t use FB, so cannot comment, but NOWHERE on any Google property can you view ANY entire news article. Yes, “rich snippets” are displayed, just like from ANY other web site – this is NOT unique to news web sites.
A “powerful grip” – what tosh. They send potential customers to news sites. As many, many people have said, if you don’t want Google to use ANY of your content, set your robots.txt file accordingly. It’s not that hard.
Frankly, I don’t know why Google doesn’t just buy a news organsation and tell the rest to get F’d.
Bother: I had a big long response nearly finished when it vanished in a puff of illogic. Sigh. Herewith a short version:
It isn’t only advertising that search and socials beat traditional journalism at. By providing direct access to all “primary sources”, they obviate a lot of the traditional “gate-keeper” role of newspapers. Today you can go straight to a source like NSW-health for your Covid-19 statistics, rather than wait for a reporter to tell you.
That still leaves three important “news” activities for the real journalists: curation and prioritisation, investigation, and opinion.
In the flood of information, curation (editorial) is worth real money. You can get a simulation from an algorithm, but humans still do it better, IMO. Specialization of fields is also important (tech, finance, foreign affairs) for detail.
Some information doesn’t want to be known, and so won’t be published to the socials or the open web. Investigative journalists are needed to dig it up.
Everyone has opinions, but well researched and argued opinions are enough to justify a subscription, and that is becoming increasingly clear, I think.
Peter clearly understands all of that, because that is basically a summary of Crikey. Good for him, I hope.
I hope that the News Showcase content syndication (and perhaps others down the track) works out.
This is not really the same issue as the media bargaining code though, nor much to do with any of the arguments so hyperbolically presented in all of the press. BJB is correct: “pay for the news it uses” only applies when it is using news, as it presumably will be once News Showcase kicks off. Providing free advertising and links to likely interested readers is not that.
Apropos nothing – I used to buy The Australian and gave up at the point where I became embarrassed to be seen in public with it (and when I stopped reading past the name of the journalists at the head of most articles).
Google News gives you Crikey, The Guardian, The Conversation and, most importantly, gives a great many other readers access to viewpoints they may not otherwise discover. Sounds like a good thing.
Hopefully, every cloud has a silver lining, Google can help support and return the media space to many diverse small and medium outlets for increased quality vs. a right wing oligopoly of limited legacy media used to promote scare campaigns, policy talking points and promotion of the LNP to import US libertarian policies.
Further, keeping an eye on and if not replicating, drawing upon best practice in digital, media and corporate regulation from the EU; the devil incarnate for anti-competitive Murdoch.