Long-awaited legislation to force big tech platforms to pay New Zealand media for the news they disseminate online is now before Parliament.
It could give our media much-needed money in years to come if it becomes law and also fill a funding gap for the government at the same time. But neither the media or the government have made much of it.
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Broadcasting and media minister Willie Jackson telling Newshub Nation the legistation to force big tech platforms to pay local media for news was imminent. Photo:
“Google and Meta. Are you putting the hard word on them to secure deals to pay for content? Are you going to legislate?” Newshub Nation host Simon Shepherd asked the broadcasting and media Minister Willie Jackson when he appeared on the show a year ago.
He said if the big tech platforms did not do deals with New Zealand's news media companies to pay them for the news that they carry on their search services and social platforms online he was prepared to draft a law to make it happen by arbitration
“They've legislated over in Australia and Canada . . . and I want to see some fairness. I want to see all these Kiwi news organisations looked after. These big players have the funding and the resourcing to be able to do that,” he said.
There was some movement after that from Google, which has now done deals with almost 50 local large and small news media outlets, though the sums involved are confidential commercial secrets.
One year later, Jackson was back on Newshub Nation earlier this month and that legislation to force the issue was still not out.
But he said it was imminent.
“It has taken too long, but the main point is it's in now. Any right thinking person or right thinking party would support this,” Jackson said.
Income from these deals could be a significant source of revenue for cash-strapped media. But the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill wasn't launched with a ministerial media conference or even a media news release.
And there wasn't an awful lot of interest in it either from the media.
Reflecting on that and his weekly column Knightly News, former New Zealand Herald editor-in-chief Gavin Ellis said that might be because the bill will just die if the current government's not re-elected in two months’ time.
National Party broadcasting spokesperson Melissa Lee told Stuff this week governments should not be involved in the business of the Fourth Estate.
“If the government was really concerned about this issue, they should have brought this bill earlier, so that we could have had plenty of time to go through the select committee process and scrutinise the bill properly,” she said.
That also echoed the big two tech titans.
In a statement, Meta head of policy for New Zealand Nick McDonnell told Newsroom.co.nz that Meta hadn't been consulted on the bill, which “ignores the realities of how our platforms work.”
In a letter to the minister released RNZ under the Official Information Act recently, Google's New Zealand manager Caroline Rainsford had also complained that standard practice had not been followed for the new bill.
The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill tasks the Broadcasting Standards Authority with creating a code for digital platforms and news media companies. If payments for news can't be agreed, the arbitration process will kick in.
The authority would be able to hand out fines and penalties of $3m or more for failing to bargain in good faith - or for refusing to engage in compulsory bargaining.
What's in this for the government?
It's a way of finding money for the media to replace the millions of dollars of public money this government pumped in to media via New Zealand on Air over three years since 2020.
The $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF) was welcomed by media outlets which competed for the cash to fund jobs and journalism projects while it lasted.
But opposition parties and political critics condemned it as a corruption of media independence, or even a ‘bribe’ to buy media’s compliance (even though millions have been paid to public and private media companies by NZ on Air ever since the early 1990s).
Coincidentally New Zealand on Air’s interim review of the PIJF’s achievements so far was also released last week.
“NZ On Air is confident that the fund’s support for a wide range of journalism and journalists has made a compelling case for ongoing subsidies to safeguard at risk public interest journalism,” NZ On Air’s own journalism team concluded.
But the Cabinet Paper for the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill says continued public funding of public interest journalism “increases risks around the perceived independence of and public trust in the media.”
It reached that conclusion last December - and according to the MCH the mandatory bargaining provisions won't be in place until December 2024.
Clearly, the hope is that payments from the big tech titans will fill the void that the PIJF spending is done and dusted.
But that presupposes that the government in place in 2024 supports this bill.
And even if it does, December 2024 is a long way off for media companies and the current economic climate.