Response to News Media Assistance Program Consultation Paper

Abstract

One of the great paradoxes of the current era is that we live in an age of news abundance, where digital technologies have made news available instantaneously from multiple sources around the world, yet we continually speak of there being a ‘crisis in news’. Whether it be job losses at major news organisations, the closure of smaller newspaper titles, or the sense that we are awash in misinformation and ‘fake news’ that is eroding the integrity of the public sphere, it is rare to be talking about the future of news in anything other than a negative light. These questions have become more pressing due to the near collapse of the traditional business model that has underpinned commercial news journalism.

For over a century, commercial news businesses have been able to rely upon dual media markets, where both display and classified advertising (or, for broadcast media, commercials) paid for the maintenance of a workforce that produced news that could be made available either for free or for a below-cost price to consumers. The rise of the internet and digital platforms have undermined this model in fundamental ways. As the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has observed, “Historically, the production of news has been a joint product with advertising…and so those ads have supported the production of the news that we all depend on…. But if advertising is going down, there won’t be the production of news”. There is considerable evidence of the declining number of news media outlets in Australia as there is internationally.