The succession has happened and legacy media lost

It's way past time to find and fund better ways of doing public-interest journalism

The Australian Government’s “media bargaining code”, which forced Facebook/Meta and Google to pay certain media companies for “use” of their content, was always flawed, and I opposed it from the beginning. It was predicated on a dangerously outdated idea of how contemporary, digitalised media works. This meant it threw good money after bad by propping up legacy media organisations in a way that allowed them to ignore obvious shortcomings in their own work.

The code was pretty much designed for that purpose and was, consequently, a huge, wasted opportunity. If you are going to shake down the tech companies, the smart thing to do would be to use the money to build a dynamic, alternative media ecosphere, one that combined the best of the old and the new and that rethought journalism’s purpose from the ground up: to serve the citizens of our staggering democracy.

It’s still not too late for that, but nobody should be holding their breath.

Regular readers will know that I have gone over these…