Southern Cross Media boss Rohan Lund has thrown down the gauntlet to big tech, urging the industry to “do the right thing” by paying for news content.
In his first public comments about the Federal Government’s proposed News Bargaining Incentive, which pushes tech giants to pay media businesses for content, Mr Lund said tech should “pay fairly” for the journalism it uses.
Social media and search firms will be levied 2.5 per cent of their Australian digital advertising revenue with the cash used to fund journalism. Tech companies can offset the cost by negotiating deals with local news providers.
“Trusted news is a core part of our strategy and it’s expensive to do properly,” Mr Lund told The West Australian. “We run newsrooms and publishing assets across communities, small regional communities and its expensive.
“We’re ready and willing to partner with big tech if it wants to do the right thing.
“But if they don’t, we’ll look to government to ensure we can keep providing those services. The same applies to AI companies. If they want to use and benefit from our journalists they should pay fairly for it.”
Southern Cross Media is the owner of WA Newspapers, publisher of The Nightly, The West Australian and The Sunday Times.
News outlets around the world have been under pressure since the turn of the millennium amid the rise of social media, web and streaming platforms which have snatched advertising-market share.
That led to a decline in Australia’s journalism workforce of 17 per cent between 2011 and 2021 according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Print media’s share of employment fell from 41 per cent to 22 per cent.
AI has added urgency to the issue with tech giants scraping the web for the enormous amount of data needed to train their systems.
The Federal Government has sought to shift resources back to publishers through the bargaining incentive but Australia’s media bosses have in recent weeks complained that the proposal was watered down and targeting a smaller revenue base.
News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller reportedly said those changes would “gut the incentive for tech platforms to strike fair deals with Australian media, right when those rules need strengthening, not softening”.
“Tech giants cannot keep dodging their obligations. Australia deserves full revenue transparency, backed by severe, non-negotiable penalties for any platform that flouts local law,” he said.
Nine chief Matt Stanton reportedly said last week that the company felt “deeply misled” because the revised plan would “engineer so-called commercial outcomes that deliberately distort the market”.
The company signed a deal with Microsoft Copilot in July.
The Federal Government has pledged nearly $68 million over three years to subsidise wages for journalists — including at Southern Cross Media — in a move it said would “support public interest journalism and media diversity”.
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