ACCC draft code leads to Facebook threatening news exit

Submissions to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s draft News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code closed last week. The joint PIJI-JNI submission made 28 recommendations, with emphasis on more pricing clarity and ensuring media plurality, with players of all sizes equally needing to be able to bargain under the new framework. 

But with Facebook signalling its intent to remove Australian news from its platforms – including Instagram – rather than operate under the final legislation, market uncertainty  has significantly increased.

Facebook’s withdrawal also raises growing concerns that the proliferation of misinformation will only worsen amid upcoming elections both in Australia and overseas as well as the current health pandemic.

PIJI continues to engage across industry in these market developments:

• Professor Allan Fels AO, PIJI Chair’s OpEd wrote in The Guardian outlined Facebook’s announcement as a premature move and that a far better tactic would be to engage seriously to boost public interest journalism.
• Professor Glenn Withers AO, a member of PIJI’s Expert Research Panel, outlined in The Conversation how pricing guidance could be established under the proposed bargaining agreement, to provide digital platforms with more clarify.

Mapping Project

Our Australian Newsroom Mapping Project has a new look and feel. Our improved functionality now lets you interrogate time lapse changes to Australia’s news landscape, such as the above histogram which clearly shows the beginning of COVID-19’s impact on newsrooms and stations.

This month’s data also tracks nine changes. The South Eastern Times, The Border Watch and The Pennant, all Scott Group of Companies newspapers in SE SA, closed on August 21. However in better news, News Corp opened three local digital titles and independently owned newsrooms started up in Logan City, Sunshine Coast and Central Queensland. The map currently captures 226 active entries: 44 expansions and 182 contractions since 1 January 2019.

Guest Blog

As our mapping research demonstrates, South Australia’s south-east region continues to have one of the largest losses of media outlets in the country, a worrying trend for a highly populated area.

Journalist Eliza Berlage recently started working for a start up newspaper, The Naracoorte Community News.

In our September guest blog, Eliza explains how and why the new masthead came to be, and how it’s faring in uncertain times.

Find out more: Bucking the trend: building a newsroom in regional Australia.

Podcast

PIJI Chair Allan Fels and CEO Anna Draffin recently appeared on the podcast Media Files with Andrea Carson and Andrew Dodd, members of PIJI’s Expert Research Panel.

They discussed PIJI’s submission to the ACCC’s draft News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code.

You can listen to the podcast here.

New Appointment

Sora Park, Professor of Communication and Associate Dean of Research
at the Faculty of Arts & Design, University of Canberra, has recently joined PIJI’s Expert Research Panel.

Sora is the project leader of the Digital News Report Australia, author of Digital Capital (2017, Palgrave) and a former Director of the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra and the Chair of Media Industry Studies Interest Group, International Communication Association. She is currently the President of Australian and New Zealand Communication Association.

Recent Media Coverage

Australia

• ‘We don’t respond to coercion’: Josh Frydenberg stares down Facebook threat, The Australian, Sept 1
• Regional publishers hit back at Facebook’s ‘inflammatory’ threat to ban news sharing in Australia, The Guardian, Sept 3
• Do Facebook and Google protest too much? The Age, Sept 1
• Google and Facebook should pay to use ABC and SBS content, ACCC told. The Guardian, August 31
• Facebook threat would only worsen misinformation epidemic it created, SMH, Sept 1

International

USA

• The coronavirus has closed more than 50 local newsrooms across America. And counting. Poynter, August 20

United Kingdom

• The value of diversity in the newsroom. Journalism.co.uk, Sept 1