While the Australian government has yet to put proposed News Bargaining Incentive legislation through parliament, regional and local news publishers are at issue with former ACCC chair Allan Fels about how funds from it should be distributed.
The legislation – which is now unlikely to reach parliament during the current session – aims to collect a levy from ‘Big Tech’ companies that fail to compensate publishers for the use of their content.
Country Press Australia president Damian Morgan warns against funds from the NBI moving “too far away from journalist numbers” as the central distribution measure.
“The purpose of the scheme should be to support the production of professional public interest journalism,” he says, “and the most direct, transparent and auditable way to do that is to base distribution on the number of working journalists employed by eligible news publishers, with appropriate weighting for small, independent, rural, regional and peri-urban publishers.”
Morgan says that while Fels about the crisis in local public interest journalism being “a democratic problem, not simply a commercial one” and that there are now “too many communities with little or no reliable local coverage of councils, courts, planning, health, police, community services and the decisions that shape people’s daily lives”.
The purpose of the scheme should be to support the production of professional public interest journalism, he says, and “the most direct, transparent and auditable way” to do that is to base distribution on the number of working journalists employed by eligible news publishers, “with appropriate weighting for small, independent, rural, regional and peri-urban publishers”.
He says a “subjective grants-style approach” would risk creating complexity, delay, uncertainty and potential unintended tax and administrative consequences.
“It could also move the scheme away from its original purpose of ensuring the major platforms contribute to the real cost of employing journalists who produce news,” he says.
“There is an important distinction between professional local news publishers and other worthy civic contributors such as volunteers, student media and community broadcasters. They all play a role, but they are not interchangeable.”
Morgan says a subsidised volunteer sector producing free local content does not complement a struggling regional masthead – “it competes with it for audience attention and advertiser confidence. “Publishers already operating at the edge of commercial viability cannot survive that kind of displacement.”
He also argues against the scheme favouring Australia’s largest media companies. “Quite the opposite,” he says.
“Professor Fels is right that the market alone will not sustain the journalism democracy needs. But the answer should be to strengthen local newsroom capacity, not dilute the scheme into a broader and less accountable pool of civic media funding.”
Pictured: Damian Morgan