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exchange4media Group organised a global virtual roundtable conference - DNPA Dialogues to decode the Publisher - Platform relationship. Paul Thomas, Managing Director, Star News Group, was one of the speakers at the virtual conference. He spoke about the digital news ecosystem in Australia and publishers.
Thomas started off the session by speaking about his association with Country Press Australia. “I've been involved in this since the very start of it from 2017 when I was asked to look into it, and then have been through that entire journey up until the legislation enacted in March 2021. And obviously still ongoing through our current agreements that we've got with the platforms. My involvement was primarily as a participant representing independent newspapers across the country through our Newspaper Association, Country Press Australia which represents 190 member newspapers.
Country Press Australia represents a wide range of sizes of publications from small regional newspapers to groups, with many newspapers, but most of our members are really quite small. Country Press Publications were the core of what the platform's inquiry of Australia represented, that is ensuring a strong local media continues to be sustained, to know that public interest journalism will be continuously provided to local communities and holding the powerful to account and acting as a voice and a platform for informed public debate.
Thomas highlighted how digital platforms used their content and took advantage of their advertisers for many years. “The digital platforms had for many years used our contents and preyed on our advertisers, yet at the same time, didn't have the same accountability through legislation such as defamation laws. And given the size of them in the newspapers, we had no power or influence over the platforms obviously. It’s great that Australia ensured this power balance was evened. And ultimately, the recommendations to the government which led to the legislation and the mandatory code.”
Elaborating on Australia’s Media Bargaining Code and how Facebook blocked news in the country, he explained, “Initially, the code was intended to be voluntary. And some discussions at that point took place between publishers and the digital platforms. But the reality is, there was no urgency and there was no commitment. And it was amazing the major changes that took place once the government announced that the code would become mandatory and they indicated through a draft bill that the platforms would ultimately be forced to reach an outcome through arbitration. Obviously, that wasn't achieved through negotiations. As we all know, it was finally negotiated only once really Facebook removed news from the platform, for a period of time, it led to a slight softening of the approach and only required this arbitration process if a platform was designated. And this really did force the platforms to come to the table and negotiate an outcome with each of the publishers.”
Sharing some key takeaways, Thomas said, “What you need to do with digital platforms in environments such as India, from the experiences that we've had, is that you need to ensure governments do provide a legislative framework that forces platforms to the table, and enables small publishers to work together as a collective to negotiate. In our case, it provided a much greater power balance, but also made it a lot easier for the platforms to work through a single point of contact.”
“If the platforms have to negotiate with, in our case in Australia, hundreds and hundreds of publishers, in India's case 1000s of publishers, that becomes almost impossible for them to reach an outcome. In the end, we also need to ensure a clear definition of who should be included in any digital platforms code. And one of the things I think we've been concerned about now in our industry is that codes such as this can be abused and platforms to our providing content for not providing public interest journalism have been included in negotiations for funds. An example of this in Australia is a platform providing things like restaurant reviews and information, but they don't have any commitment to public interest journalism,” he concluded.
Thomas also engaged in an interesting Q&A session.
Excerpts:
Pawan Agarwal, Deputy Managing Director, DB Corp Ltd.: This is a quote from the statement that you made to the Australian antitrust regulator. In the letter to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, you wrote that the duopoly of Google and Facebook have had a profound impact on Star News Group over recent years, impacting revenue profitability and the company's ability to provide public interest journalism to local communities. While I wanted to know where all did you feel the pinch the most and could you quantify the exact loss?
Quantifying an exact loss would be very difficult. So, the single biggest issue I think that Facebook and Google had on local publishers has been their ability to control their advertising platforms and essentially control the prices that businesses pay in local environments. Unless you're selling the Facebook platform as a publisher, you can't place ads on Facebook. With Google, they essentially control the amount that people pay, and obviously through things like Google Ads, they control the advertising environment quite significantly as well. So, the inability of a small local publisher or even a larger publisher to be able to monetize the digital business in an advertising environment has become almost impossible.
Tanmay Maheshwari, Managing Director, Amar Ujala & Chairman, DNPA: What does the future hold for you guys, both on the print side as well as the digital side, in the next three to five years, how is the business shaping up and what will be the type of journalism that you guys would do more and what’s the ultimate outcome?
in Australia, it's been a significant change. So our business and the industry group that I'm involved with, is very much about regional and local journalism and newspapers. So, we don't tend to cover national stories. We're very much about hyper-local journalism. And in Australia that was quite controlled up until the pandemic in 2020. So, sort of two big companies in Australia that dominated in that sphere, and in 2020 when the pandemic hit, there was a significant mass number of papers that were closed essentially overnight.
And since then, in Australia, there's been a really significant increase in start-ups that have been started by independent publishers. And it's interesting to see that the real change in what's been provided to local communities now they're getting and that's partly because of the digital platforms money that's coming through and we have had some other good governments for Australia. But independent papers now are producing in the same areas that the big players were producing papers. They're providing papers that are probably three or four times the size and three to four times the journalism that those big companies were providing. They don't do syndicated content, by and large, and there has been a really big shift back to hyper-local. The local communities in Australia because of those closures have really seen what they were missing out on. And for a period of time, they didn't have a newspaper and the whole fabric of that society started to fall apart. And so there's just been a really significant shift. And I think I'm excited by the future. I think there are obviously challenges in how we continue to monetize ourselves across the digital platform. There is still significant difficulties in getting a model online that provides that scalability and that's why governments and that's why the digital platforms and others have to play a part in that, and I think the future will always now be but there's got to be those added mechanisms involved in that ongoing sustainability of a local medium.