Last week, the great and good of New Zealand’s news media urged MPs to back a law change to make Google and Facebook pay them for their news. They say the income could be critical to the survival of journalism here. But the lobby group campaigning for better public media says there’s a better way to ‘send a lifeboat’.
Jeff Bell's cartoon for Stuff channels the news media's opinion of the power and wealth of the big online platforms. Photo: Stuff / The Post
Last week, the nation’s news media publishers pitched up in Parliament to make a pitch to MPs to pass the legislation left behind by the Labour government that would effectively compel big tech companies who carry their news online to pay them for it.
After the Economic Development, Science and Innovation select committee heard them out, Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee told reporters she doesn’t support the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill “in its current form” but would wait to see what the Committee recommends.
So did the prime minister on Newstalk ZB last Monday.
“I just think media companies can do their own individual deals with those tech platforms - as your umbrella organisation NZME and others have as well,” he told Mike Hosking.
Google has done several individual deals since 2021 to carry local publishers’ news in its own service Google News Showcase.
But the Ashburton Guardian’s Daryl Holden told the committee it was “a pittance”.
“We accepted the deal from a position of no strength. I'm almost embarrassed to say how much we get because it would not be enough to hire one graduate journalist,” he told the Economic Development, Science and Innovation committee.
He was far from the only one to tell the Committee last week the imbalance of power in the market is such that they can't get the tech titans to negotiate a genuine value for their news.
That's the reason that the News Publishers Association went to the Commerce Commission for permission to negotiate collectively - and the former government put the Bill forward in the first place.
The prime minister was also right about the Herald’s owner NZME doing a deal with Facebook owner Meta, which has been much more reluctant to negotiate with local media.
But NZME chief executive Michael Boggs told MPs last week it won’t last long.
“Meta has not renewed after a year because I think they think this (Bill) isn't going to happen,” he said.
This week, NZME’s annual profit plunged 46 percent to just $12.2 million due to further falls in advertising revenue.
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Media expert Dr Peter Thompson - speaking as chair of the lobby group Better Public Media - told the Committee news businesses support the Bill because they're in such difficult commercial circumstances.
“It's understandable. If you're drowning, a straw might look like an attractive thing to capture. But we'd rather send a lifeboat,” told the Committee last week.
“I don't think they're over there overstating the crisis. My question is whether or not the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is actually the best mechanism for providing some kind of relief,” Dr Thompson told Mediawatch.
The legislation is inspired by Australia’s law change and a bargaining code which has returning hundreds of millions of dollars to the Australian media. So why shouldn't we follow suit?
“There's no guarantee that the revenue paid by the platforms to the news media will actually be reinvested in news production - or public interest types of news - rather than shareholder dividends,” he said.
“Also the larger players clearly benefit disproportionately,” said Thopmson, who is also an associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington / Te Herenga Waka’s school of media and communication.
TVNZ - currently cutting costs and jobs - says it needs to spend more than $100m renovating their entire IT system to keep up with demand for TVNZ+. Shouldn't it be able to spend extra revenue on that too?
“I've got no objection to TVNZ investing in its infrastructure if that's what sustains it. The question is on what principle are you going to get the (tech) platforms to support it," Thompson said.
“The idea is that somehow the platforms have co-opted or stolen the news - and that's what they need to compensate the news media for. I think that is a misreading of the actual market process and the value chains on which they operate," he said.
“Primarily, the platforms have benefited from controlling and mass-harvesting individual data. That's what's enabled them to capture such a large share of the overall advertising market. In my view, platforms ought to be compensating society as a whole for that and for the harms that are inflicted by the operation of their business model.
“You have to be really, really clear about what you're asking the platforms to compensate the news media for. And that's why I would argue that there's a better argument that they ought to be compensating society as a whole and that includes supporting the Fourth Estate.
“I think you could design the Bill in a much better way to not only support news media, but also provide some kind of compensation to society as a whole for the harms inflicted by enabling the proliferation of disinformation, hate speech and harvesting our personal data.
“If we introduced a levy on the digital advertising market, which is roughly worth $1.8 billion a year, you'd be generating as much money as the Public Interest Journalism Fund. I think that would be a far more elegant, transparent and fundamentally simpler model to implement than one that relies on negotiations between news media and the platforms, and then goes to a very convoluted arbitration process if they can't agree.
“By implementing a levy, administered by an independent arm's-length entity like New Zealand on Air, you can guarantee that that money gets reinvested in public interest news. An approach where all kinds of digital revenues are required to contribute towards supporting a healthy Fourth Estate is actually fairer and more equitable and much more difficult to argue in court that it treats any single company unfairly.”
