Imagine you were designing a democracy from scratch.
How would you ensure people had enough access to accurate, independent information?
My guess is that you would not be content to leave this entirely in the hands of private corporations and billionaire Citizen Kanes.
And if you could wind back time to 2006 and the advent of social media, surely you would keep it in public hands – like the broadcasting spectrum – or regulate it from the outset. Probably both.
As it is, when we contemplate the news media in Australia at the end of 2024, we behold the messy, the imperfect and the almost-broken, with glimmers of hope and opportunity.
For the last three decades, news media has been the fastest changing industry on the planet, and the disruption will continue.
In the year ahead, we will be coping with the impact of artificial intelligence as well as the increasing domination of news “influencers”. Overseas, some influencers are already more powerful than mainstream media organisations.
I’ll get to all that later, and have a stab at predicting some trends.
But first I want to draw attention to a minor miracle – a shift in government thinking about the media. This nods to the proposition in my first two paragraphs – that if you were designing the news industry from scratch, you might not leave it entirely to the market.
The past few decades make it clear that if we continue to do that, we fail. Misinformation flourishes. Democracy falters. And yet, at the same time, politicians are the last people you want to control the news.
The past couple of weeks have seen a bunch of government announcements about support for the media. There has been news of more ABC funding, and more money for local media.
But, most significant of all, there is the News Media Incentive – a plan to use the tax system to impose a levy on digital platforms, such as Google, Meta and TikTok, with the money being redistributed to support organisations providing public interest news – defined as that which serves a civic purpose, operating with responsibility and accountability.
The digital platforms will be able to avoid paying this levy if they strike commercial deals with media enterprises, and the scheme will be structured in a way that incentivises them to do so. Unlike the previous News Media Bargaining Code, they won’t be able to avoid making payments by simply refusing to run news content.
For the past 20 years I have reported on and appeared before seemingly endless inquiries into the woes of the news media, all of which have arrived at largely overlapping conclusions about the need for government to take a role. But there has been little action, and most of it has been ad hoc and unimaginative.
Now, much to my surprise, it seems we have the first signs of a coherent media policy addressing the crisis in journalism.
There are lots of details still to work out, and plenty of room for things to go wrong.
But perhaps the most significant shift is encapsulated in the policy framework, which says “government influence [over the news media] must remain checked, but … inaction is no longer a viable option”.
I agree. The risks are obvious – government interference and a loss of independence. But when the market fails, we need to find solutions.
The beauty of using the tax system is that, once the eligibility requirements and laws are set, implementing them becomes an administrative process, naturally at arms’ length from politics.
News media used to be a simple business: assemble an audience by providing news and entertainment, then sell that audience to advertisers. It was phenomenally lucrative and for most of the 20th century it seemed like it would go on for ever. But since the 1990s, the business model has been progressively brought undone by the internet.
Serious news media increasingly relies on audiences paying subscriptions – but only about 13% of Australians do this. That leads to an elite, rather than a mass media.
All this is, literally, old news. It means that an already underreported country has lost huge amounts of its journalistic capacity and its democratic resilience.
So is it all golden pastures from here? Far from it.
A Pew Centre survey has found that about one in five Americans – including a much higher share of adults under 30 – regularly get their news from influencers. Those on X (formerly Twitter) skew right. Those on TikTok are more progressive.
We have to expect this trend to take hold in Australia.
I predict media companies will increasingly try to either recruit influencers, or grow their own.
An optimistic view would be to see this as one answer to the other trend threatening the media: news avoidance.
In their book Avoiding the News, authors Benjamin Toff, Ruth Palmer and Rasmus K Nielsen advocate news that is “closer to people’s lived experience, presented in more accessible ways, and focused on things they can influence”.
This, they acknowledge, will be seen by traditional journalists as a dumbing down of the news, or as mere puffery (though they point out there is plenty of puff already). But the core of the matter, they say, is “not intelligence, it is intelligibility”.
Journalism, especially political journalism, they write, “tends to make assumptions about what audiences know about political actors and processes that are impossible for all but the most dedicated news lovers to live up to”.
But, they respond:
“The core of the matter here is not intelligence, it is intelligibility. Political journalism, especially, tends to make assumptions about what audiences know about political actors and processes that are impossible for all but the most dedicated news lovers to live up to.”
It is in this space that influencers will move – perhaps journalists could learn a thing or two from them while, I hope, avoiding partisanship.
Other trends? I suspect we are past peak social media for consuming serious news. X is in decline and Facebook has deliberately made itself useless. News media companies will increasingly turn to distribution and promotion channels they can control – such as newsletters and podcasts, clever games and recipe sites – to try to broaden their reach and increase revenue.
Finally there is AI, which is changing so fast that any predictions must be tentative.
It is already being used to help write headlines and summaries of articles – which it does quite well – and it can do a competent job of writing formulaic stories, such as sports results. It can analyse data, and tip reporters off to potential stories.
But, so far, AI has proved pretty useless for doing actual journalism – by which I mean going to places, talking to people, thinking it through and exercising judgment in how to report the results.
So far, the basic journalistic mission of bearing witness would seem to be an innately human activity.
I don’t expect that to change soon.
But there are huge opportunities in AI – already, it is possible to use it to create a competent translation of news content into other languages.
Within two years, we will see the dissolving of language barriers that delineate international audiences and media markets.
That presents enormous possibilities. For a liberal media to penetrate and contribute to emerging and challenged democracies.
At the other end, there will be new levels of propaganda and fearmongering penetrating our democracies. It is already happening.
In all these areas of threat and opportunity, we have to hope the good guys are ready, and will at least hold their own.
In this, enlightened government media policy must play a role. Inaction is indeed no longer an option, because the change is profound, and upon us.
• Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and author. She is an honorary principal fellow of the Centre for Advancing Journalism and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group
