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 It was predicated on a dangerously outdated idea of how contemporary, digitalised media works.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 arguments forever—the subject has preoccupied me and others for over twenty years now—but the response to Meta’s announcement that it will cease participating in the bargaining code and that it will, in April, close down its dedicated news tab in Australia, has seen such a depressing (if predictable) outbreak of self-righteous and ill-informed bleating from Australia’s political and media class, that maybe we should go over it again.
Look, I get it. The news industry ain’t what it used to be and it is no mystery as to why. Digitised media provides businesses (and individuals) with infinitely superior platforms through which to advertise their wares—whether you are selling a house, a car, or a hamburger—and the market, the precious market, the virtues of which so many in the media like to lionise, has decided, decisively, ruthlessly, and unequivocally that it would rather spend its advertising budget with social media platforms or dedicated advertising sites than with newspapers, TV and radio stations.
The media likes to portray this as Google and Facebook stealing their revenue, but it is only stealing in the sense that cars stole the transport industry from horses. The concomitant claim that the tech giants are using the content generated by journalists to attract eyeballs to their own platforms—and are therefore stealing that content and should be forced to pay for it—is undermined by the fact that Meta in particular has no interest in hosting news content on any of their sites, including on their new Threads platform.
It is simply breathtaking the extent to which the mainstream media lies about the value social media gets from conventional news content.
Writing in the Conversation, journalist Peter Greste notes that “Even in a world overflowing with digital content, we recognise the need for good journalism, produced to ethical and professional standards, to help inform public debate and good policy-making,” which is true. But the reporting on the media code is a perfect illustration of the utter hypocrisy of the “independent” journalism claim, casting doubt on their ability to maintain ethical and professional standards. None of the legacy companies benefitting from the code provide an exact figure on how much they have been getting paid, while none of the reporting I have seen even acknowledges their massive conflict of interest in reporting the issue in the first place.1
The result is shoddy coverage where self-interest trumps rational analysis, where Meta and Google (and their users) are routinely demonised, and basic facts about the nature of news and social media are distorted. Greste himself fumbles the claim that Meta makes money from news, writing that they have used news content “to drive profits” and have only stopped paying for it because “news became too expensive.”
This is nonsense, as media analyst Thomas Baekdal has pointed out. He notes that when Meta removed news content from their feeds in Canada it had almost no effect and that “it's clear that they have learned that deemphasizing news is a positive thing.”2
Baekdal goes on to cite Anthony Albanese’s comments that “some multinational company just being able to get that free ride off the back of the hard work of news organizations here in Australia is not on,” and he points out that this “is a perfect example of just how completely out of date this thinking is.”
Baekdal says that Albanese “(and many in the media) is still convinced that Facebook needs news, that news is what makes Facebook work, and that they are using news to get people to use it.
“None of that is true. Facebook is not saying ‘We need you, but we don't want to pay for it.’ They are saying ‘We have no need for you, so we are going to stop focusing on your industry.’”
Greste (and others) are right to insist on the importance of reliable public interest journalism to a functioning democracy, but here is the real problem: too many in the industry are still in denial about how bad things have become in the legacy media.3 Most will acknowledge that the industry is struggling financially—big concession!—but few will deal with the fact that the problem goes much deeper than the business model.
Journalism as a public good is broken, shattered, and it is way past time that the media—and governments—stopped making a hobgoblin of social media and recognise that the basic tools of political journalism in particular are past their use-by date—the whole press-gallery model with its associated tools of balance and so-called objectivity—and that they need to take responsibility for their failings and stop blaming everyone from Donald Trump to Mark Zuckerberg.4
The reporting on Meta’s decision to withdraw from the media code is a perfect example of this brokenness: if the media can’t report on their own industry properly, why the hell would we trust them to report on anything else?
The sad truth is, we don’t trust them, people are fleeing mainstream media, not because Meta and Google are fucking things up, but because the industry itself is failing and has become contemptuous of its own customers. Everyone from Dan Rather to John Hewson is making the point, though the problem goes back much further than these commentators allow.
Sigh.
Maybe one day we can stop reiterating these problems and devote our energy to fixing them.
To the extent that there is an upside to all this, it is that the Australian media landscape is already reinventing itself independently of the legacy outfits, though as I have noted many times—at some length, here—the new is struggling to be born.
Still, if you follow Denise Shrivell’s new TrueNorth newsletter (which I hope you do), you might be pleasantly surprised at how much good reporting there is out there, and Denise is doing a stellar job in aggregating the best of it.
Distribution trumps content
Niche trumps mass
Personal recommendation trumps social
In further good news, I spent an evening recently with a group of people working on ideas generated by Essential Media boss, Peter Lewis. This was the first part of what we hope will become an ongoing process of development, though our initial discussions brought home to all of us, I think, just how difficult the problem of “fixing the media” really is. (As if we didn’t know.) I nonetheless think we are on the right track with the model that was being discussed the other night, and I will keep you informed on our progress. You can get a sense of what we have in mind if you read the piece by Peter Lewis I published last year.
For public interest journalism to thrive, it will require a range of funding, primarily from government, public subscription, and philanthropy, and on the latter point, it is good to see the relaunch of Neilson Foundation’s journalism support project. Their initial foray into journalism support fell in a heap, but they have learned from that, and as the AFR reports, “Judith Neilson says her journalism think tank directed funding towards mainstream media companies such as Nine and News Corp that could have been better used by smaller or grassroots publications.”
Amen to that, and it is time for the government to a have similar epiphany and look beyond the media code as a funding model directed at legacy media.
None of this, by the way, is to defend Google or Facebook or other social media sites or communication apps. They, too, are going through a period of reinvention that is undermining their place in the media ecosphere. They are currently in the process of ruining the role they once had as a vehicle of genuine social sharing that allowed a new media landscape to emerge, increasingly turning themselves into degraded sites as they build moats around themselves precisely to lock people in and undermine access to quality content.5
So, where does this leave us?
IF you want a glimpse of a possible media future, consider The Politics, the newsletter spun off from The Monthly and being run by the inimitable, Rachel Withers. Withers’ reinvention of the “traditional” blogging idea of an in-depth look at a daily topic supported by a link dump and insightful analysis is a project that has a lot of potential, perhaps heading in the direction of the Semaphor news group and their newsletter agglomeration model, though that will require The Politics build capacity for original reporting.
Regardless, the newsletter model is the latest iteration of media reinvention, an indication of how audiences who abandoned legacy media and moved to social media are now allowing their inboxes to be their new front page. It is a model that addresses the trust issue that is at the heart of why so many people have lost faith in the mainstream.
Meta’s withdrawal from the media code, then, should be a trigger for a massive and long-delayed rethink of public interest journalism, especially by those who produce such content, the journalists themselves, and by governments who are in a position to help.
As ever, engaged audiences are leading the way, and the sooner the industry catches up, the better.
It is worth noting that the Conversation has never received “Meta money”, though they should have been high on the list of beneficiaries if the money had ever been distributed rationally.
I’m being critical of Greste here, but his article is well worth the read. His argument is less inconsistent than it is an example of a thoughtful writer struggling with the difficulties inherent in the topic. I basically agree with where he ends up.
Bernard Keane’s piece on this is worth reading.
The ongoing arguments about the reporting of the war in Gaza are a perfect example of how these traditional tools can damage serious reporting, and the failure to confront the problem is most notably present in regard to the New York Times coverage of the matter. This NPR article updates on what the internal arguments at the “paper of record”.
Corey Doctorow’s theory of “enshitification” partially explains what is going on, and he describes that concept in these terms:
Facebook attacked MySpace’s high switching costs head on, lowering them for users and unleashing network effects and rapid growth.
But as Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from users to advertisers: engaging in more surveillance to enable finer-grained targeting and offering more intrusive forms of advertising that would fetch high prices from advertisers.
This enshittification was made possible by high switching costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial, and romantic ties. And just to make sure that users didn’t sneak away, Facebook aggressively litigated against upstarts that made it possible to stay in touch with your friends without using its services. Twitter consistently whittled away at its API support, neutering it in ways that made it harder and harder to leave Twitter without giving up the value it gave you.
When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.
I think this is what’s killing the social media giants.
Facebook and Google seem like very different cases to me. The core business of Facebook has always been family and friends interaction, with content made specifically for FB (similarly Instagram, though Meta should be forced to divest one of them). Its role as a news aggregator largely reflected the fact that it was the main social medium before the arrival of Twitter and now the Substack, Mastodon etc. Now there's no need for that role, and it's going back to happy snaps.
By contrast, Google's core business relies entirely on content created by others, selected in a way to support Google's advertisers. That's deeply problematic, in a way that's not exclusively a problem for media.
Good article Tim.
Also, I agree that Denise’s True North newsletter is excellent!