Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code: What next?

by Associate Professor Diana Bossio 22/01/2024

A year after the introduction of the Code, we found the legislation was not always successful in meeting its publicly stated purposes; supporting public interest journalism.

by Associate Professor Diana Bossio 22/01/2024

The Australian recently government found itself the unlikely harbinger of a global trajectory toward more interventionist models of platform regulation with its enactment of the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code (NMBC) in 2021. The NMBC aims to support public interest journalism by ostensibly compelling digital platforms to bargain with news media organisations for remuneration for news content posted online. The Australian Federal Treasury completed the first review of the NMBC in 2022 and hailed the legislation a success. In a lot of ways, it was. There were 34 deals made amounting to more than AU$200 million across the media sector, which represents about 61 per cent of the market being covered by at least one deal. But is the Code fair or sustainable? More importantly, is the legislation replicable? I was part of a research team that examined policy documents and interviewed news media executives about their experience of negotiating with the platforms, with some findings published recently in Policy & Internet. Our research resonates with global responses to the ‘regulatory turn’ in platform governance, showing both the issues with the more interventionist models of regulation, and the lengths platforms will go to avoid them. A year after the introduction of the Code, we found the legislation was not always successful in meeting its publicly stated purposes; supporting public interest journalism. We showed that several issues remain unaddressed in the Australian legislation, including: lack of designation forcing platforms to continue to comply with the legislation, registration criteria for news outlets prioritizing legacy media organisations over equally worthy independent news providers, and the most importantly, the unintended extension of platform power into defining which media organisations constitute public interest journalism and should therefore benefit from the legislation. Commercial confidence provisions in the legislation means news organizations and platforms are not required to report how much money they received, how they invested it, nor whether that investment aligned with the NMBC’s aim of supporting…

Politics & Government

Is Social Media Killing Democracy?

by Phil Howard 15/11/2016

Both the Brexit referendum and US election have revealed the limits of modern democracy, and social media platforms are currently setting those limits.

by Phil Howard 15/11/2016

Donald Trump in Reno, Nevada, by Darron Birgenheier (Flickr).

This is the big year for computational propaganda — using immense data sets to manipulate public opinion over social media. Both the Brexit referendum and US election have revealed the limits of modern democracy, and social media platforms are currently setting those limits. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook now provide a structure for our political lives. We’ve always relied on many kinds of sources for our political news and information. Family, friends, news organisations, charismatic politicians certainly predate the internet. But whereas those are sources of information, social media now provides the structure for political conversation. And the problem is that these technologies permit too much fake news, encourage our herding instincts, and aren’t expected to provide public goods. First, social algorithms allow fake news stories from untrustworthy sources to spread like wildfire over networks of family and friends. Many of us just assume that there is a modicum of truth-in-advertising. We expect this from advertisements for commercial goods and services, but not from politicians and political parties. Occasionally a political actor gets punished for betraying the public trust through their misinformation campaigns. But in the United States “political speech” is completely free from reasonable public oversight, and in most other countries the media organisations and public offices for watching politicians are legally constrained, poorly financed, or themselves untrustworthy. Research demonstrates that during the campaigns for Brexit and the U.S. presidency, large volumes of fake news stories, false factoids, and absurd claims were passed over social media networks, often by Twitter’s highly automated accounts and Facebook’s algorithms. Second, social media algorithms provide very real structure to what political scientists often call “elective affinity” or “selective exposure”. When offered the choice of who to spend time with or which organisations to trust, we prefer to strengthen our ties to the people and organisations we already know and like. When offered a choice of news stories, we prefer to read about the issues we already care about,…

Politics & Government

The life and death of political news: using online data to measure the impact of the audience agenda

by Jonathan Bright 09/09/2014

Editors must now decide not only what to publish and where, but how long it should remain prominent and visible to the audience on the front page of the news website.

by Jonathan Bright 09/09/2014

Image of the Telegraph's state of the art "hub and spoke" newsroom layout by David Sim.

The political agenda has always been shaped by what the news media decide to publish—through their ability to broadcast to large, loyal audiences in a sustained manner, news editors have the ability to shape ‘political reality’ by deciding what is important to report. Traditionally, journalists pass to their editors from a pool of potential stories; editors then choose which stories to publish. However, with the increasing importance of online news, editors must now decide not only what to publish and where, but how long it should remain prominent and visible to the audience on the front page of the news website. The question of how much influence the audience has in these decisions has always been ambiguous. While in theory we might expect journalists to be attentive to readers, journalism has also been characterised as a profession with a “deliberate…ignorance of audience wants” (Anderson, 2011b). This ‘anti-populism’ is still often portrayed as an important journalistic virtue, in the context of telling people what they need to hear, rather than what they want to hear. Recently, however, attention has been turning to the potential impact that online audience metrics are having on journalism’s “deliberate ignorance”. Online publishing provides a huge amount of information to editors about visitor numbers, visit frequency, and what visitors choose to read and how long they spend reading it. Online editors now have detailed information about what articles are popular almost as soon as they are published, with these statistics frequently displayed prominently in the newsroom. The rise of audience metrics has created concern both within the journalistic profession and academia, as part of a broader set of concerns about the way journalism is changing online. Many have expressed concern about a ‘culture of click’, whereby important but unexciting stories make way for more attention grabbing pieces, and editorial judgments are overridden by traffic statistics. At a time when media business models are under great strain, the…