US tech titan Meta, owner of Facebook, announced last week that it is ending its brief commitment to funding Australian journalism. In 2021, the company, along with Google, struck content deals with local publishers in response to the passage of the news media bargaining code, which forced the two companies to the negotiating table to pay for the local news content they display. Now, with those deals expiring, Meta wants out. Behind the theatrics of power and the interests of Australia’s media giants, it represents another looming threat to journalism as a profession.
Meta claims, by way of justification, that the number of people using its Facebook News feature has collapsed by 80% in the past year as content consumption habits migrate towards short-form video, popularised by TikTok and Meta’s own Instagram Reels. This is quite plausible, but it is not an agnostic process the company is passively observing from the sidelines. Meta has considerable latitude over the content it distributes to its users and the form in which it appears. If Facebook users are consuming less news, it’s largely because Facebook is showing them less of it.
Meta’s plan to escape the news game is a long-running project. Even before Australia’s world-leading effort to extract rents from major tech platforms for the benefit of publishers (now copied by the United Kingdom and Canada), the Mark Zuckerberg-led company was feeling the heat on news content. News was an enormous growth engine for Facebook in the 2010s, but mounting pressure from politicians, regulators and the press around election influence and political power has led the company to look elsewhere for user engagement. Threads, the company’s recently launched Twitter clone, won’t show political content at all unless users specifically request it.
Despite the bellyaching from the Australian government and consumer protection bodies like the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over Meta’s decision, there was little reason to believe the news media bargaining code was anything but a temporary salve to a far deeper problem. Its functionally clumsy approach, which hinged on imposing a de facto tax on links to Australian publishers’ content, could only work as long as that remained the way Australians accessed news. In a world where content is just as likely to appear in a 30-second video, or stripped down and churned out by generative AI, it no longer feels fit for purpose.
This leaves Australian publishers in a tough position. It is no secret the media companies covered by the news media bargaining code have used the funds raised by these deals — estimated as being worth up to $70 million a year from Meta alone — to hire journalists and expand news teams. ABC managing director David Anderson told staff in an email that the public broadcaster was funding 60 regional journalists with its bargaining code money. Of course, it was always Australia’s biggest media companies — like News Corp, Nine and Seven West Media — who saw the biggest boons from the deals, with many smaller publishers and independent media missing out on the rivers of gold.
The expiration of the Meta deals will certainly be felt by those Australian media giants, which are already contending with a tight advertising market and anaemic subscription growth. But the pain will be most acutely felt among journalists, already shocked by a decade of deep cuts. As tech giants such as Meta and Google absorb the lion’s share of ad revenue and publishers face an uphill battle growing subscriptions in a shifting market, the people who actually report, assemble and distribute the news fight for scraps in a shrinking profession.
All evidence suggests the Albanese government will take some form of action against Meta in an effort to enforce the news media bargaining code. It leaves to be seen just how effective the prospect of forced arbitration and yet more deals will be in the long run, as the obliterating march of technology continues to force change upon an ailing industry. Meta, for its part, has shown a willingness to hold the line as it remakes the media landscape, with its total blockade on news content in Canada now in its sixth month.
It’s hard to picture what the journalism profession will look like in six months, let alone six years. But it is evident that the Silicon Valley firms who now exert total control over distribution are ever more resistant to sharing the spoils, and that — whoever wins the resultant power struggle — it won’t be the journalists.
Disclosure: Private Media, the publisher of Crikey, has a news content licensing agreement with Facebook, which will expire following Meta’s funding commitment.
How dare Meta withdraw its support for Australian journalism?
These capitalist buccaneers need to model their behaviour on their moral superiors, such as the Australian government.
There’s no way the Australian government would ever withdraw its support for Australian journalism. Like reducing budgets for public broadcasters, or passing laws that favour foreign media companies, or selling off broadcast spectrum used by community groups to the highest commercial bidder, or stuff like that. Never!
…or leaving an Australian public interest journalist/media publisher to rot for years in foreign prisons under trumped-up charges…
One would like to see the ‘alternate hypothesis’ applied i.e. how would journalists be doing without Big Tech platform funding, just as badly?
Meanwhile it ignores the monopoly or oligopoly behaviour of merged MSM groups dominating the space; maybe they need to be broken up and compelled to follow ‘free market’ principles they espouse for others?
“there was little reason to believe the news media bargaining code was anything but a temporary salve to a far deeper problem” – more cynically, there is little reason to believe the code was anything other than the Morrison government giving a big gift to the Molochs. As Peter Greste and others have pointed out, there is a genuine problem given the precipitate collapse of legacy media – how to fund quality, public-interest journalism. A related challenge is how to address this without directly or indirectly using public money to prop up firms like the Molochs, which have been turning journalism into alt-right propaganda.
As more and more systems functions continue to move to the internet, it has become clear that there is a vast gap between effort and value on the one hand and reward on the other. I follow other internet issues and the picture is pretty much the same all over – consumers want the content but get irate when asked to pay something (whether that’s money or just viewing an ad) in return. People spit venom because a site asks them to turn their ad-blocker off before continuing, people insist that they have a ‘right’ to view TV shows or movies for free…
Investigative journalism, along with a lot of other things, needs some sort of payment system that rewards the journalist or other content maker. The media bargaining code was never going to be the answer, but neither is government funding and nor is funding by billionaire largesse. Patreon and similar subscriber schemes are possibly part of the answer but they will not be the whole answer.
I feel sorry that Crikey and some other small publishers will miss out but the howls from the bigger media players and government, “that Meta had abandoned the industry” or they are,” walking away from their responsibilty to support Australian media” was ridiculous coming from such free market loving Neoliberal’s, both private and government.
It was most surreal of all to witness the ACCC – our peak “competition” body – going in hard to do rent seeking on behalf of one industry sector purely because that sector has outsized political influence. It’s little wonder meanwhile that we’ve wound up with a duopoly in the supermarket sector that causes welfare implications for the entire nation while the regulators were busy charging at windmills on their hobby horses.
Call it what it is – market failure. The commercial mass media no longer deliver quality public interest journalism. Public broadcasting needs to be better funded, with robust governance provisions that protect its independence. There are still a few good journalists hanging on by their fingernails at the Harvey Norman advertising wrap-arounds formerly known as the Fairfax Press, but when Adele, Kate, and the rest retire will anyone else step up? As for the Moloch media – it might pay some journos, but to what end…?
There is an AFR article (comments) from News Corps Michael Miller executive chairman…..
It started me off on a coughing fit, and I couldn’t stop…..until I banged my head against the wall….
There’s an illuminating juxtaposition on p13 of The (Adelaide) Advertiser today. The top two thirds is Michael Miller banging on about Meta’s action with comments like:
The bottom two thirds of the same page was Andrew Bolt using his poison pen to create a false equivalence between Victoria Police apologising to the West Papuan they had wrongfully arrested and their refusal to apologise to George Pell (the ‘martyred Cardinal’) and somehow dragging Islamophobia into it as well. Quality, enlightening news indeed, Michael.
Why would a labor government prop up neoliberal propaganda outlets? I get sick of the US world view.
Free to air could be a place of insight , debate on public policy, creativity and education that seeks ways of living that aren’t solely based on consumptive madness, something more for the people and less the corporations.
Labor are only in power because they have shape shifted and work within the boundaries imposed by fossil fuels and US corporations, in order to survive. Gee the media giants are going to cut back journalists, this is a journalists story, media owners control content portrayal and quality, we’ll just see a rise in dodgy and harmful products for sale as content ratio if its possible.