Tag: Covid-19

Finally…someone gets tough on Facebook

TUESDAY COMMENTARY

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is rightly being praised for her handling of the Covid-19 pandemic but she needs to get over her Millennial attitude to social media and join Australia in making them pay their way.

Canberra has announced a tough mandatory code to make Facebook, Google and others pay for the news content that have been pillaging from news media’s digital platforms. New Zealand should do the same, preferably adopting the same code for a trans-Tasman approach to regulating companies that thought they were beyond the reach of mere governments. So far, our government has gone no further that saying ‘we’re looking at it’ but characterising it as ‘a longer-term measure’.

Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg wants a code developed by July and, if the tech giants do not negotiate payment rates in good faith, rates will be imposed. There will be heavy financial penalties for non-compliance. Expect the code to be in place before the end of the year. Continue reading “Finally…someone gets tough on Facebook” →

NZ media in existential crisis

The following is a submission I made today to the Parliamentary Epidemic Response Select Committee chaired by Simon Bridges. The committee sat for four hours hearing from media groups about the effect of the Covid-19 crisis. I said I could not over-emphasise the urgency of the issues facing our commercial media. One chief executive told me the industry needed to be “immediately put in emergency triage”. However, like all emergency care, that is only the beginning and I urged the adoption of a three-stage process to create a new, sustainable media ecosystem. Continue reading “NZ media in existential crisis” →

NZ media must rise from Covid blitz

‘Post-war’ reconstruction

This week New Zealand media organisations are participating in a series of workshops that aim to help them through the commercial turmoil of the Covid-19 lockdown. It is an invaluable initiative by the Ministry for  Culture and Heritage that should provide some immediate relief, but no-one should expect it to be the long-term answer to their plight.

If our private sector media are to remain standing when the nation recovers from the aftermath of the pandemic, virtual workshops need to be followed by their own version of the Bretton Woods Conference that reset world financial systems after the Second World War. Continue reading “NZ media must rise from Covid blitz” →