Open society on death row

News armageddon is easy to imagine

From the point of view of a print journalist, TV news was never good.

Ninety-second packages with a voice-over written by a semi-literate reporter, two grabs and a piece to camera. The writing is rank with cliches, the reporter’s voice falsely deep, and the viewer left with a sense of having been informed while recalling no details. Call that reporting?

Flip the perspective and see print from a TV point of view: ancient, anonymous and emotionless. For TV people, text-based journalism has always been horse-and-buggy media. An anachronism, with no ability to build connection and profile. In contrast, TV news is alive, and a TV newsroom is buzzing with life. It takes camera operators, directors, producers, editors, and reporters to make a news bulletin.

Which is why commercial TV news goes first.

As market caps shrink and media companies change hands, measures that would have once been unthinkable take definite shapes.

In Australia, 10 News closes. Followed by Seven News in Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth. Then there’s a national bulletin coming out of Sydney, an innovation that Nine mimics in order to keep its head above water. But in short order even the national TV bulletins are too expensive. It’s easier to switch the lot off than to pare them down to an embarrassing remnant. What would have once been unthinkable now feels unremarkable, in a world where TV reaches only an ageing minority.

For the few years that TV stations still exist as linear broadcasters, they can turn a profit by running gameshows and overseas programming. The days of paying for a broadcasting licence are long gone. Instead, media owners canvas the government for concessions. They are unsuccessful because their political sway has fallen too low to matter. These once-proud companies are heading for an afterlife as second-rate on-demand video platforms.

Next, the accountant comes for the text-based publishers, the old print people. The product developers and sales strategists long ago optimised the subscriptions pipeline. There’s no more blood in that stone. Payments from digital platforms disappeared as first Meta and then Google refuse to carry news content, leaving publishers with a revenue and audience hole. Then long-static subscriptions begin to drop as an economic downturn bites and readers turn to free alternatives.

AI-generated news floods the market, reducing advertising rates to fractions of a cent per 1000 views. Reporters are sacked in step with declining revenue, and investigative reporting goes extinct. People increasingly turn to AI agents for news and information.

No one has found a legal mechanism to compensate media for unearthing news, because no one owns information. AI platforms now have a stranglehold on attention, and therefore advertising, and there is no compelling reason for people to subscribe to news services.

In Australia, state-based and then national publishers shut one-by-one, mirroring the fate of local regional publishers early in the century. In New Zealand, TVNZ has amalgamated with RNZ, Stuff is long gone and NZME closes with the collapse of radio audience and revenue.

The small digital startups of the 2010s, with minimal original reporting capacity and no traffic from social and search, can no longer get by in the broken ecosystem. Commercial news is dead in Australia and New Zealand. 

Only one monolithic public media organisation operates in each market, fuelling - at the taxpayer’s expense - the summaries provided by foreign-owned AIs. The financial contribution of these massive AI platform companies to national economies is minimal. They have no need for local workforces. They pay almost no tax. The media organisations that had served as their nemeses are gone, so there’s no means of exerting pressure for change.

So what?

The craft disappears

Thousands of media workers lose their jobs. With no prospect of employment for students, journalism education and the idea of journalism as a career is gone. With no newsrooms to train reporters and editors, the skills of investigating, analysing, writing and presenting disappear. 

Public and corporate media dominate

Fewer journalists means fewer stories, more that goes unnoticed in a world that is becoming harder to understand. The journalists who remain are either employed by public media or increasingly, by non-media corporations. The corporate journalists work for marketing departments and their remit is constrained by the commercial interests of their employer.

Australian Public Media (APM) and New Zealand Public Media (NZPM) are powerful but unwieldy. Their newsrooms are accused of bias by all sides of politics, and their funding subject to political interference.

Algorithms rule news

Most people consume news that is served to them automatically by algorithms. AI agents become the most common way of accessing news, and the content they deliver is tuned to the user’s preferences. The algorithms reward the most inflammatory, sensational and divisive stories. Civic discourse degenerates and partisanship increases.

Loss of shared world view

There is widespread nostalgia for a past where mainstream media presented audiences with a set of common facts about the world. This commonality of knowledge has fragmented, leading to mutually incomprehensible world views. Political divisions become social divisions.

The open society on death row

The institutions of democracy decay along with journalism. Judges lose their fear of opprobrium. Politicians suffer no consequences for corruption. Police and other public servants have no meaningful public review of their actions. This chaos is exploited by state enemies to further increase division and undermine belief in the open society. Totalitarians promise to restore order, harmony and their nation’s former greatness.

Are we living this now?

The dystopia I paint above as an exercise in unmitigated pessimism is in some aspects disturbingly familiar. Some of these signs of decay are with us already: for example, the algorithmic erosion of consensus and loss of investigative journalism capacity. The enemies of open societies are exploiting that openness to inflame political divisions, and totalitarians are waiting in the wings.

My bleak fantasy is prompted by the closure of my old newsroom in New Zealand, Newshub.

Newshub was the news service of TV3, one of the fixtures of the New Zealand media scene. It had been broadcasting since 1989 as 3 News, and like Seven, Nine and 10 in Australia, it was part of the furniture. So although I knew about its dire finances, it was still a shock when Warner Bros Discovery announced it was closing entirely. New Zealanders lost half of their TV news capacity in one day.*

The experience of working in the smaller NZ market exposed me to the realities of news media in a way that has until now been less obvious in Australia. Print and online media have suffered greatly in Australia, but TV has not. Unfortunately, I don’t think we are at the bottom for news in any medium.

It is clear to me that news on its own - without the backing of an existing diversified media business - is no longer a viable commercial prospect. If you don’t believe me, consider starting a news business from scratch right now. The fundamentals of audience, revenue and investment are very tough challenges. Having begun the news journey, how do you dig a moat around your content to keep out the algorithmic and human borrowers? General national and international news is commodity, and local news is a tough nut to crack with scant reward for success.

Why news fails as a digital business

When I co-wrote a book about the sharing of news on Facebook in 2015, it was already clear to me that digital platform companies did not like news. It is a messy business, legally risky and politically contentious, and worst of all, costs scale with content output. To publish more stories, you need more journalists. News is hand made. That is anathema to companies who have built trillion-dollar empires on automation and user content.

And so digital platform companies, despite taking the majority of the advertising revenue that previously financed news media, refuse to step into the role of publisher. There is no incentive, and plenty of downside, to becoming responsible for news. This was the lesson Facebook learned before it changed its name to Meta in 2021. Its years of engagement with news publishers had not turned around the growing narrative of a dark force preying on society.

The Australian News Media Bargaining Code, introduced to force Google and Meta into content deals with publishers, was designed to shift money to news. It is a horrible instrument because it misrepresents the relationship between platforms and news. The same problem bedevils the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill under consideration in NZ, and other similar legislation around the world. Platforms don’t secretly covet news, and use their immense market power to get it for free. They don’t like news. They would rather do without it. It is the publishers who need the audiences and engineering of the platforms.

But the reality of this relationship does not absolve the digital platforms of a wider responsibility. The platforms rely on the health of the open societies in which they operate, and from which they extract billions. They have a responsibility to contribute. This responsibility arises from their custody of socially relevant information, and from the benefits they derive from this information. This is not an obligation to specific news publishers but to society in general.

They cannot be expected to make this contribution voluntarily.

The answer is not a shoddy shakedown, but a digital platform levy raised on clear principles, that can be distributed according to transparent criteria that support public interest journalism. Will such a levy survive the inevitable well-financed legal challenge? Will it break international trade agreements? These are challenges for the drafters. With the future of the open society at stake, it’s worth applying our best minds to the task.

*A bulletin produced by Stuff has taken Newshub’s place at 6pm on Three, but its original and live reporting capacity is small.

I’ll be back next week with something more uplifting.

Have a great weekend,

Hal