Zuckerberg’s abandonment of Australian media leaves journalists fighting for scraps

US tech titan Meta, owner of Facebook, announced last week that it is ending its brief commitment to funding Australian journalism. In 2021, the company, along with Google, struck content deals with local publishers in response to the passage of the news media bargaining code, which forced the two companies to the negotiating table to pay for the local news content they display. Now, with those deals expiring, Meta wants out. Behind the theatrics of power and the interests of Australia’s media giants, it represents another looming threat to journalism as a profession. 

Meta claims, by way of justification, that the number of people using its Facebook News feature has collapsed by 80% in the past year as content consumption habits migrate towards short-form video, popularised by TikTok and Meta’s own Instagram Reels. This is quite plausible, but it is not an agnostic process the company is passively observing from the sidelines. Meta has considerable latitude over the content it distributes to its users and the form in which it appears. If Facebook users are consuming less news, it’s largely because Facebook is showing them less of it.

Meta’s plan to escape the news game is a long-running project. Even before Australia’s world-leading effort to extract rents from major tech platforms for the benefit of publishers (now copied by the United Kingdom and Canada), the Mark Zuckerberg-led company was feeling the heat on news content. News was an enormous growth engine for Facebook in the 2010s, but mounting pressure from politicians, regulators and the press around election influence and political power has led the company to look elsewhere for user engagement. Threads, the company’s recently launched Twitter clone, won’t show political content at all unless users specifically request it.

Despite the bellyaching from the Australian government and consumer protection bodies like the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over Meta’s decision, there was little reason to believe the news media bargaining code was anything but a temporary salve to a far deeper problem. Its functionally clumsy approach, which hinged on imposing a de facto tax on links to Australian publishers’ content, could only work as long as that remained the way Australians accessed news. In a world where content is just as likely to appear in a 30-second video, or stripped down and churned out by generative AI, it no longer feels fit for purpose.

This leaves Australian publishers in a tough position. It is no secret the media companies covered by the news media bargaining code have used the funds raised by these deals — estimated as being worth up to $70 million a year from Meta alone — to hire journalists and expand news teams. ABC managing director David Anderson told staff in an email that the public broadcaster was funding 60 regional journalists with its bargaining code money. Of course, it was always Australia’s biggest media companies — like News Corp, Nine and Seven West Media — who saw the biggest boons from the deals, with many smaller publishers and independent media missing out on the rivers of gold.

The expiration of the Meta deals will certainly be felt by those Australian media giants, which are already contending with a tight advertising market and anaemic subscription growth. But the pain will be most acutely felt among journalists, already shocked by a decade of deep cuts. As tech giants such as Meta and Google absorb the lion’s share of ad revenue and publishers face an uphill battle growing subscriptions in a shifting market, the people who actually report, assemble and distribute the news fight for scraps in a shrinking profession.

All evidence suggests the Albanese government will take some form of action against Meta in an effort to enforce the news media bargaining code. It leaves to be seen just how effective the prospect of forced arbitration and yet more deals will be in the long run, as the obliterating march of technology continues to force change upon an ailing industry. Meta, for its part, has shown a willingness to hold the line as it remakes the media landscape, with its total blockade on news content in Canada now in its sixth month.

It’s hard to picture what the journalism profession will look like in six months, let alone six years. But it is evident that the Silicon Valley firms who now exert total control over distribution are ever more resistant to sharing the spoils, and that — whoever wins the resultant power struggle — it won’t be the journalists.

Disclosure: Private Media, the publisher of Crikey, has a news content licensing agreement with Facebook, which will expire following Meta’s funding commitment.