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Minister of broadcasting Willie Jackson (Image: Toby Morris)
Minister of broadcasting Willie Jackson (Image: Toby Morris)

MediaDecember 7, 2022

What is the government’s plan for TVNZ, RNZ and the tech platforms?

Minister of broadcasting Willie Jackson (Image: Toby Morris)
Minister of broadcasting Willie Jackson (Image: Toby Morris)

An interview widely described as a trainwreck was a missed opportunity to explain some vital reforms, writes Duncan Greive.

Thomas Coughlan did not hold back. In a surgically deft opinion piece for the NZ Herald, the site’s deputy political editor described media minister Willie Jackson’s appearance on Q+A last Sunday as “worrying”, a “trainwreck interview”, one filled with “awkward insinuations”. His recap used the word “bizarre” six times. On Monday prime minister Jacinda Ardern, after initially saying she wouldn’t comment as she hasn’t seen it, found time to watch some highlights and seemed to diplomatically concur with Coughlan. “I don’t agree with some of the comments that were made. I have spoken to the minister about the interview.” 

The irony is that Jackson’s appearance was meant to be a victory lap – an opportunity for the minister to announce that New Zealand would follow Australia and Canada in demanding tech platforms like Google and Facebook fairly compensate news organisations for use of their content. That announcement got swamped in the furore over the minister’s responses to host Jack Tame’s fair questions about the function of the legislation, and particularly the argument for merging TVNZ and RNZ into a new, futureproof media organisation, ANZPM.

Willie Jackson on Q+A

Much like Three Waters, the government’s media reforms are an overdue response to decaying infrastructure. And much like Three Waters, arguments over relatively arcane details now threaten to derail the whole programme. Below I’ll explain what is being done, and why this embattled legislation really matters.

Why is the government creating a new media organisation?

The successive waves of borderless internet access, user generated content, ultra-fast broadband and smartphones have fundamentally changed the way most New Zealanders consume media. We are now much more likely to create media ourselves, and view content from all around the world, in a way which was unimaginable at the start of the millennium. 

This has been very challenging to traditional media organisations, which previously funded news through a near-monopoly on attention and advertising, and are now in a losing battle for both. The winners are tech platforms which aggregate content from all around the world, and distribute advertising alongside it with few of the regulations which govern more conventional media in New Zealand. Alongside this, because the audiences deserting radio and television are much more likely to be young, Māori, pan-Asian and Pacific, there is a core unfairness to taxes funding media like RNZ, which largely serves older Pākehā audiences.

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In response to this dilemma, the government has elected to take its current media properties, TVNZ and RNZ, and put them inside a brand new organisation called ANZPM. The thinking is that it will draw on the best skills of both organisations while creating something new designed for the digital age. The era we’re in now is one in which more and more consumption is happening on overseas tech platforms, which are much harder to make money from (they understandably want to keep it for themselves). Because of that, the government has committed $109m in extra funding to help ANZPM entertain and inform audiences which currently miss out.

What will happen to TVNZ and RNZ?

These reforms are very unpopular – just 22% were in favour in a recent Taxpayer’s Union/Curia poll – which is largely because TVNZ and RNZ are themselves very popular, particularly with older New Zealanders. The government has tried to explain that it’s not about breaking what’s working – that what is currently non-commercial (mainly RNZ) will remain that way, for example. But Jackson has also talked up the need for a more prominent role for content which reaches those audiences which currently get missed, which probably sounds a lot like change to people who don’t necessarily want anything to change.

Was there another way?

In some ways, it might have been easier to simply create a new entity – call it Digital NZ – to explicitly make content for the missing online audiences. That might have placated fans of TVNZ and RNZ, but would also implicitly condemn those organisations to a slow death, which would be quite unfair, given that they are outwardly trying, with varying degrees of success, to become something new while still performing their traditional roles. But while clunky, it would probably have been more politically palatable and caused less ruckus.

Another alternative would have been to ramp up the budget of NZ On Air, the funder of public media for all platforms, while telling it to aggressively go after those audiences it currently misses. Instead it has seen its budget slashed and transferred to ANZPM. This would have avoided the sense that the government is favouring its own media properties and leaving the private sector media to twist in the wind. While the likes of Jackson and Tracey Martin, the ex-NZ First MP leading ANZPM’s establishment board, have been at pains to say it should be a collaborative net positive to the private sector media, there is a lot of understandable suspicion, especially given TVNZ’s reputation as an extremely well-run commercial operator.



How does this link to legislation to force big tech platforms to bargain with news media?

During the 2010s, the vast majority of news media income came from traditional channels like newspaper and television advertising, even as audiences increasingly consumed their content online. Now that those advertising channels are in sharp decline, and with a recession coming, there is an international movement toward getting tech platforms to pay for the news they carry, whether that be video or text stories shared by users on Facebook or snippets carried by Google across its various products. 

The tech companies have understandably resisted this, saying that they are in fact helping the news industry by distributing its work. Irrespective of where you stand on that argument, it’s undeniable that the rise of the tech platforms has corresponded with a shrinking of local news media, as advertisers move upstream toward the valuable targeted data the tech platforms hold. The tech platforms are unimaginably vast in terms of their scale and influence, limiting local news organisations ability to figure out what’s fair and where compensation should sit.

Lost amid the conflict between Jackson and Tame on Sunday was a major announcement – that the government will bring legislation to force the tech platforms to bargain with local news producers, mirroring Australia and Canada in trying to force a resolution. (For more on this, read Toby Manhire’s excellent story from Monday.) Because this will apply to all local producers of news, it allows for both public and private sector media to participate, and thus avoids the spectre of the government pumping hundreds of millions into its own media organisations and just shrugging at the fate of the private sector media.

If all this fails, what does the future look like?

Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr has acknowledged that he is attempting to engineer a recession to get price increases under control. When recessions come, the first thing to go is advertising, as companies mirror consumers in cutting what spending they can. Despite the growth of paywalls at NZME and membership models at The Spinoff and Stuff, advertising remains comfortably the largest revenue stream at all those organisations, along with all the TV and radio companies (the fully taxpayer-funded RNZ aside).

Without interventions like ANZPM and the tech bargaining code, it’s likely that 2023 will see a return to the rolling layoffs which characterised the 2010s in media. The spectre of a social media-first election covered by a fast-shrinking cohort of journalists is likely not thrilling to any party, and only the most hardcore media cynics think the solution for news media is for it to shrivel further.

Taking a longer view, if you believe in any kind of independent fourth estate, some kind of urgent reform is manifestly necessary. On some level all of this is already starting to turn again – video is eating the internet, with Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok hosting large quantities of context-free clips from news shows posted by users, while news organisations struggle to resource more new formats which seemingly require their presence while presenting very few revenue opportunities. Behind all this lurks fast-rising artificial intelligence, which digests the whole of the internet’s information and spits out natural language which is both compelling and often factually inaccurate. 

All of which is to say that despite Jackson’s combustible interview on Sunday, just standing still equates to a dire outlook for news media. That’s why there was a rare unanimity in response to the government’s announcement of the tech bargaining code: the stakes are ultimately existential. These reforms can be critiqued, and should evolve in response to submissions from those with sector knowledge. But if you believe in the importance of news media, they cannot be allowed to fail.


Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

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Illustration: Toby Morris
Illustration: Toby Morris

PoliticsDecember 5, 2022

New Zealand just signed up to a global staredown with Meta and Google

Illustration: Toby Morris
Illustration: Toby Morris

Legislation requiring the big digital players to share revenue with local publishers is directly inspired by examples in Australia and Canada. Toby Manhire looks at the history and the stakes.

On February 18 last year, Facebook folded its arms, held its breath and did something unimaginable: it banned the sharing of news content on its platform for all of Australia. 

The legislators had told those behemoths of Silicon Valley, Google and Facebook, they should compensate Aussie news outlets for linking to, excerpting and feeding off their content. That they must share the revenue from their bloated advertising bellies. The Zuckerberg colossus decided to call the bluff.

It lasted less than a week. Facebook declared it was satisfied with some softening of the New Media Bargaining Code. Cynics said they’d blinked. 

Since April, a sequel has been playing out in Canada. Executives from Meta, as the Mark Zuckerberg juggernaut is these days known, told a parliamentary committee looking at similar legislation that “we may be forced to consider whether we continue to allow the sharing of news content on Facebook in Canada”. That threat, and specifically the words we may be forced, were issued at least eight times at the Ottawa committee and in written Meta submissions.

Yesterday saw the first frames of a second sequel. Even as Canada’s hearings continue, New Zealand has officially begun a process of its own. Willie Jackson, the minister responsible for media, steered the world’s third parliamentary cab off the rank, promising legislation to oblige the giants of the internet to strike deals with local publishers. 

What would the New Zealand law look like?

Speaking on Q+A yesterday, Jackson said the legislation will draw heavily on the Canadian example. There, he said, more than 150 publishers have signed deals even before the legislation is in place. The source for this, presumably, is Google itself saying that it has reached deals with more than 150 Canadian outlets. Google offers such a data point as an argument against fresh law-making. Publishers say without the spectre of legislative action, these great distended offshore sponges wouldn’t even be at the table.

The formula here is the same: large digital players such as Google and Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) would be encouraged to strike deals with news publishers. Should they fail to do so to the satisfaction of the regulator – in New Zealand’s case the Broadcasting Standards Authority – it would hit the “backstop”, in the form of an independent arbitrator determining the compensation. 

How did we get here?

It used to be that local advertisers spent their local money with the local outlets that produced local content. However simplistic and once-upon-a-time that framing may be, it is roughly right, and that virtuous circle has fundamentally, perhaps irrevocably, broken. 

The digital giants, partly by plan, mostly by accident, happened upon the media lunch and ate it. They developed ways to target advertising that blew people creating and publishing content out of the water. They continued to feed on and deal out the content audiences were keen on, but they did nothing to pay for its creation. 

Policymakers around the world have pondered whether and how to deal with that breakdown in media circuitry. In 2020, the Australian government tasked the competition regulator, the ACCC, with looking into power imbalances between the big platforms and local news businesses. That culminated in the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code of 2021. 

Broadcasting minister Willie Jackson (Image: Tina Tiller)

The state of play in New Zealand 

The media industry in Aotearoa has to some degree stabilised after the rolling crises of the early days of Covid, which witnessed, among other things, the complete shutdown of Bauer NZ. The broader outlook, however, remains precarious. Costs are rising sharply. A recession has been promised, even engineered, by the Reserve Bank – and among the first victims of any recession is advertising, media spend, and “reader revenue”, in the form of memberships and subscriptions.

It is against that backdrop that this new legislation is progressing. If the TVNZ-RNZ merger – however clumsily it might have been communicated – is an initiative intended to secure the future of public media in an increasingly platform-agnostic, digitally disrupted future, the New Zealand state staring down the leviathans of Silicon Valley is designed to do the same for commercial operators.

Last month the Commerce Commission confirmed its provisional decision from April that permitted New Zealand media operators, in the form of the Newspaper Publishers Association plus a few stragglers including – ding, ding, full disclosure, The Spinoff – to collectively negotiate with Meta and Google for a period of 10 years. 

“The NPA’s collective bargaining arrangement is likely to allow the news media companies to pool their resources, improve their bargaining power when they are negotiating with Google and Meta, such that they obtain better contract terms, and ultimately improve the production of news content,” said Commission chair Anna Rawlings.

NZME, which operates the Herald and Newstalk ZB, grimaced awkwardly and excused itself from the collective negotiating table when it struck direct deals with both Meta and Google, however. The company nevertheless issued a statement yesterday saying it supports the proposed legislation, which “ensures the future sustainability of our local news media and contributes to a healthy media ecosystem”. Google has also agreed deals through its News Showcase project with RNZ, Scoop and Newsroom.

The opposition spokesperson for media, Melissa Lee, told The Spinoff yesterday that the National Party will take a formal position once they’ve seen the legislation itself, but that she was concerned “the threat of legislation is an overstep”, given that Google and Meta have already undertaken a number of deals with New Zealand publishers. She was concerned, too, that instead of supporting journalism, funds from the digital giants might end up in “the back pockets of shareholders”.


Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple PodcastsSpotify or your favourite podcast provider.


Did it work in Australia?

Depends, obviously, who you ask. Some smaller publishers have complained they have not had a fair suck of the sav. There is no doubt that the Murdoch empire – without whose muscle, some reckon, this whole process would never have kicked off – has done handsomely. That in turn has led to claims that shareholders are benefiting, rather than journalism. 

But one of the architects of the Australian News Media Bargaining Code, former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Rod Carr, has judged the legislation “extremely successful”. In a report for the Judith Neilson Journalism Institute in May, he concluded: “The NMBC has been successful by any measure. It has almost completely met the objective set for it, and more quickly than initially hoped for. Few other government measures can claim the same.”

Carr’s advice for “those wishing to replicate but improve it” was this: “Think carefully about whether what [you] are seeking to do will make good commercial deals between the news media businesses and the platforms more or less likely.”

The Canadian debate

Canada’s legislation differs from Australia’s by adding a tool which, according to one supporter, “allows more publishers to get access to funding and provides some democratic oversight, accountability and transparency to those funding deals”.

The committee discussions on Canada’s bill have, however, been fiery. One parliamentarian accused Meta of adopting “modern-day robber baron tactics” in its threat to repeat the pulling of the news plug.

Google, for its part, submitted that the law as proposed “fundamentally breaks the way search (and the internet) have always worked”. Their argument is that it constitutes a “link tax”, thereby destroying the central organising mechanism of the internet. (The definition is rejected by many who say it’s quite unlike the EU antecedent.)

Opponents of Trudeau’s Liberal government have also got stuck in, but often for different reasons. In a heated session of the Heritage Committee on Friday, Conservative MPs said the bill would hurt local operators. “The losers clearly on this are local newspapers in our communities,” said one Conservative MP. “This will favour established legacy media outlets that have the size, clout, and connections to meet all the criteria.”

Another said small and ethnic minority media had not been represented while “this bill has absolutely been placed in favour of the large broadcasts and large newspaper conglomerates. That’s a sad day for Canadians.”

Facebook and news

In recent months Meta has substantially scaled back its initiatives focused on the news media industry. It has shuttered its newsletter platform, closed Instant Articles and winded back its Accelerator programme (in which The Spinoff has previously participated). With 11,000 redundancies and a multibillion-dollar bet on the Metaverse, its claim that news is way down the priority list is no mere negotiation tactic. Facebook might called it the “news feed” but on the main trunk of content these days, Meta says, less than 4% of what users see is actually news. 

There is at the same time a discernible resentment among many of those in the Zuckerberg cosmos at the ingratitude of the organisations upon which their algorithm can shower clicks. The Meta position on the new legislative initiatives, as put to Canada’s lawmakers by global policy director Kevin Chan is this: “We would be forced to pay publishers for giving them free marketing on Facebook.” That’s my emphasis, but there’s no emphasis needed on the eyelid fluttering on what he called “a most peculiar and unorthodox arrangement”.

Chan told the Canadian parliamentary committee that his platform sent 1.9 billion clicks a year to news sites, “free marketing” worth $230 million (NZ $265m). According to Meta, the equivalent numbers in New Zealand, across the last 12 months, saw 390 million clicks worth what they would calculate at a value of NZ $33m.

The company is yet to get to the point of intoning “we may be forced to consider” in New Zealand, but its regional policy director, Mia Garlick, yesterday said: “This proposal fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between Facebook and news, publishers are the ones who control whether and how their content appears on Facebook and receive significant value from sharing it.”

She told The Spinoff in an email: “It also fails to recognise our current commercial deals in New Zealand or government’s own independent advice that news legislation won’t solve the longstanding digital transformation challenges facing the news industry. We are concerned about the unintended impacts future legislation will have on innovation in both the media and broader tech sector, in particular for smaller entrepreneurial publishers including Māori, regional, digital first and diverse media.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment. 

A global trend

Australia, Canada and now New Zealand are being watched closely by other jurisdictions. A number of larger countries are mulling similar moves – Brazil, India and the United States among them.

The Columbia Journalism Review is monitoring the progress of the various initiatives around the world. There is an urgency in the moment, it says. “Recession is predicted in many countries, following the economic turmoil precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with advertising markets a likely early casualty.”

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