Thinking through Possible Futures for the Australian News Industry

Up next in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Agata Stepnik, whose interest is in stakeholder perspectives on the sustainability of commercial and publicly-funded news production in Australia. Her project is engaging in interviews with stakeholder groups – publishers, policy-makers, journalists, advertisers, and platform operators – and explores how they have conceptualised news media’s digital transformation since the emergence of Web publishing in the 1990s, and what futures for news production they envisage.

Across all these interviews there was a strong recognition of the social and institutional value of news to democracy; however, news was also strongly positioned as a commodity for consumers, and much discussion about their willingness to pay for the news. Loss of advertising revenue and the lack of alternative funding sources was widely seen as a significant issue; lack of infrastructure and capacity development, growing reliance on platforms, and impacts to trust, credibility, and relevance of news were all acknowledged as well. The causes for these developments were disputed, however, and perspectives also diverged significantly between metropolitan and regional areas, where the speed of adoption was also notably different.

A key challenge today is the planning for a post-News Media Bargaining Code environment: this requires the development of alternative revenue streams, including government funding, as well as new initiatives to build credibility and audiences, deal with disruptions from artificial intelligence in content production and delivery, and further challenges to credibility and reliability.

The question of government intervention in funding news production was especially controversially discussed. Funding was seen as propping up important but unprofitable outlets, but also as distorting the market and enabling state capture of news media outlets. A focus on niche content was also identified as an avenue to brand loyalty and profitability, along with voluntary subscription payments and additional activities that are not in themselves journalistic. Licencing deals with AI providers may also offer new income streams.

There are some hopes for the effective use of generative AI in newsrooms, as well as the willingness of emerging news consumers to pay for news access; niche news may especially benefit here, while the future of general news is more uncertain. Government intervention is seen as almost inevitable here, but exactly what form this might take remains unclear. Why all of this needs to happen – i.e. whether it is the fault of platforms siphoning off advertising revenue or news producers failing to update their business models – remains a subject of intense dispute too.