As a former journalist, I agree that a robust news industry is absolutely essential to a functioning democracy. And while that should make it something to support with tax revenue, in the US right now, it’s terrifying even to imagine what Trump 2.0 would do with that control. It isn’t comfortable to think what Biden would do to silence critics who are complicating his re-election campaign.

However, I have to disagree with the professors’ basic premise about the Media Bargaining Code taking money from a profitable business to prop up an unprofitable one. First, news should be viewed as a public service, not a business. Second, Facebook et al. established and grew their ad businesses by relaying journalists’ work; that’s worth something. The fact that FB no longer wants to pay for the content they’re profiting off of is just too damn bad. Third, the complaint about redistributing wealth doesn’t hold water since that’s exactly what the traditional news outlets’ own ad businesses did: transfer wealth from profitable businesses (largely retail and services) to support a less profitable one (journalism producers).

I’m not Australian, so arguably I don’t have a dog in this race. But it doesn’t sit well to watch Facebook rape and pillage an entire vital industry and then just walk away leaving it for dead. They must be held to account.

All of the news where I live is paywalled.

Why should Facebook pay for content that users cannot even access? Surely anyone who is actually paying for access isn't finding articles from Facebook - they are getting the news directly from the source.

The only content that isn't paywalled is from ABC, but their definition of "local" news is national news which happens to be a story about something that happened here. Usually reported on so poorly it's obvious the journalist lives a few thousand kilometres away and doesn't really understand the issue at all.

The state of journalism in Australia is really bad - but I don't think Facebook paying Murdoch did anything at all to fix things. If anything news is even worse now than it was few years ago when the deal was originally signed.

The government needs to go back to the drawing board and re-think their approach. Personally i'd like to see something similar to our health system where we have a national journalism budget dedicated to funding private journalists the same way Medicare funds businesses in the medical industry.

And make sure there are strict rules around ethical journalism and also encourage original reporting - zero funding if you re-hash news broken by someone else.

It’s one of the reasons I subscribe to a couple of news outlets, I value the news and someone needs to pay. Most people have forgotten that they used to “buy” newspapers, after all, everything is free on the internet.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It was a hot-and-cold affair that defined over a decade of online publishing and the work experience of a generation of reporters, and has ultimately left the industry a shadow of its former self.

Although it may be tempting for lots of reasons, the Australian government should avoid putting the boot into Meta by enforcing the News Media Bargaining Code as it's threatened to do.

Digital-only media outfits such as BuzzFeed and Vice rode a wave of growth, generating huge numbers of clicks that translated into ad revenue.

"Facebook encouraged news providers onto the platform in the ways it promoted content," Dan Angus, a professor of digital communications at QUT, said.

Instead of breaking up that monopoly, or closing tax loopholes, the Code effectively takes money from a profitable industry (big tech) and distributes it to an unprofitable one (news).

The News Media Bargaining Code is trying to restore a model for financing journalism that has gone the way of the fax machine, the fountain pen, and the pocket address book.

The original article contains 1,402 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Yeah - I read through this a couple of times, and I feel the headline is a bit misleading.

I reckon this problem has been around longer than Facebook. As the second professor put it, news orgs aren't in the news business - they're in the attention-grabbing business.

It's been many, many years (decades) since I remember my old man sitting down and reading a newspaper front to back, then back to front, on a weekend. He read every inch - news, sports, classifieds, public notices. When those things eventually started shifting to digital - in isolation - newspapers (and magazines) started feeling it.

Facebook is simply the newest face they can apply to the problem.