Facebook profited from the decline of Australia's news organisations, but enforcing the News Media Bargaining Code will make a bad situation worse without solving the problem of who will pay for the news.

Try and get past the fact that this is sort-of about Facebook. Because it’s more about the demise of news than it is about Facebook, specifically.

news organisations were never in the news business, Amanda Lotz, a professor of media studies at QUT, said.

"They were in the attention-attraction business.

"In another era, if you were an advertiser, a newspaper was a great place to be.

“But now there are just much better places to be.”

The moment news moved online, and was “unbundled” from classifieds, sports results, movie listings, weather reports, celebrity gossip, and all the other reasons people bought newspapers or watched evening TV bulletins, the news business model was dead.

News by itself was never profitable, Professor Bruns said.

"Then advertising moved somewhere else.

“This was always going to happen via Facebook or other platforms.”

It’s a really fascinating read. We can all agree that independent journalism is valuable in our society, but ultimately, most of us don’t so much seek news out as much as we encounter news as we go about our day.

I’m sure the TL;DR bot is about to entirely miss the nuance of the article. I recommend reading the whole thing.

    • @CaptObvious@literature.cafe
      3•10 months ago

      So long as there’s a strong mechanism to ensure their independence, this is the way to go. We used to have taxpayer-funded journalism (PBS and NPR) in the US. They still exist, but they’re forced to solicit advertisers “underwriters” to keep the lights on thanks to Reagan and Gingrich.

      We have Murdoch’s “Fox News” too. I think that man may be evil incarnate. You guys can have him back. :)