Facebook profited from the decline of Australia's news organisations, but enforcing the News Media Bargaining Code will make a bad situation worse without solving the problem of who will pay for the news.

Try and get past the fact that this is sort-of about Facebook. Because it’s more about the demise of news than it is about Facebook, specifically.

news organisations were never in the news business, Amanda Lotz, a professor of media studies at QUT, said.

"They were in the attention-attraction business.

"In another era, if you were an advertiser, a newspaper was a great place to be.

“But now there are just much better places to be.”

The moment news moved online, and was “unbundled” from classifieds, sports results, movie listings, weather reports, celebrity gossip, and all the other reasons people bought newspapers or watched evening TV bulletins, the news business model was dead.

News by itself was never profitable, Professor Bruns said.

"Then advertising moved somewhere else.

“This was always going to happen via Facebook or other platforms.”

It’s a really fascinating read. We can all agree that independent journalism is valuable in our society, but ultimately, most of us don’t so much seek news out as much as we encounter news as we go about our day.

I’m sure the TL;DR bot is about to entirely miss the nuance of the article. I recommend reading the whole thing.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    3•10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    It was a hot-and-cold affair that defined over a decade of online publishing and the work experience of a generation of reporters, and has ultimately left the industry a shadow of its former self.

    Although it may be tempting for lots of reasons, the Australian government should avoid putting the boot into Meta by enforcing the News Media Bargaining Code as it’s threatened to do.

    Digital-only media outfits such as BuzzFeed and Vice rode a wave of growth, generating huge numbers of clicks that translated into ad revenue.

    “Facebook encouraged news providers onto the platform in the ways it promoted content,” Dan Angus, a professor of digital communications at QUT, said.

    Instead of breaking up that monopoly, or closing tax loopholes, the Code effectively takes money from a profitable industry (big tech) and distributes it to an unprofitable one (news).

    The News Media Bargaining Code is trying to restore a model for financing journalism that has gone the way of the fax machine, the fountain pen, and the pocket address book.

    The original article contains 1,402 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!