Radioinfo
Reporting: Sarah Patterson. Commentary: Steve Ahern August 3, 2026
Some of the world’s biggest tech companies could be slugged a 2.5% levy on their digital advertising revenue, should they fail to strike commercial deals with Australian media organisations.
That’s up from 2.25%.
Changes to the federal government’s news bargaining code have been announced today, with new legislation set to be tabled in parliament in the coming weeks.
The federal government says big tech companies should provide compensation to the organisations which provide them with content through news.
It says this in turn will mean Australia has a more sustainable news production ecosystem.
However, the levy will only be applied to digital advertising revenue, and AI companies will continue to be excluded from the scheme.
Timothy Koskie, Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Digital Communication at the University of Sydney‘s media trust project, says “We know that news media is necessary for democracy to function effectively. People have to know things in order to make a meaningful choice in the matter.”
But Koskie says we’ve never really identified a model which sees people paying for vital journalism.
“We’ve seen an ads [business model] to support that production, but people don’t pay for the news. It’s the ads that end up with the revenue.”
“I would say one of the biggest things that we need to think about is how much we as a society understand that we need to have the news in order to operate effectively, what are we willing to pay, and how are we willing to make sure that that news keeps happening?”
Canvassing other business doels for good journalism Koskie told Steve Ahern: “The ad revenue is no longer there and we have to pay journalists… the news media bargaining code in the first piece… [then] we identify other sources of support, like, for instance, philanthropic funding, but that can have worse issues of editorial control than advertising supported news. Or when we have the government say this is something we should [fund] but, you can see in New Zealand, [critics say] the government is bribing journalists.
“it’s really easy for political operators to provoke mistrust in the news these days. We [need to] step in on this relationship, find some way to get those funds and keep this democratically necessary resource going, even though it’s not necessarily in the profit motivated best interests of these platforms that are going to resist it.”
Steve: People used to pay for print newspapers, in the early days of radio they even paid a subscription to lisxten to a radio station, but that didn’t last long. In Britain they pay a licence fee to watch tv.
“it wasn’t a lot of money. It was like an old form of analytics where we could say we’ve got this many paid people, so you can bet those people are reading our papers with some interest, and therefore our ad space is worth quite a bit more… the New York Times sells some pretty substantial subscriptions to the point that it has become a massive foundation for their business model in a way that didn’t previously exist, but they bundle this with significant services that aren’t news. The puzzles are extremely famous, the Wordles and recipes. This compares to how things used to be where people were essentially paying for the classified ads. That model was cross subsidising that really vital democratic resource… we believed that we were paying for news but we also paid for other things in the newspaper [that we valued].”
Steve: Like so many things in public policy, it’s about diversification, the bargaining code is adding another diversification of a revenue stream.
The media bargaining code talks about the concept of core news, does that exclude publications that might be trade journals like we run or specialist publications or something that’s entertainment or arts based?
“They have a specific designation, you can argue about what it means… But things like sports news, entertainment news, celebrity gossip, that kind of thing, is explicitly excluded. And let’s say, for example, you’re a publication that engages in quite a bit of that, it’s going to change whether you’re eligible… One of the ways that this has been gotten around in the past is to actually just pay for a reporter who only does this kind of news. It’s called the local democracy reporting service. But in this case, they’re more concerned about whether or not the news organisations can stay open at all. So it’s not quite as specific as that, in this case it’s incorporating freelancers or other people that are contributing to news production... There’s a much wider range of people that are involved, so they seem to have taken advice on board [from the consultation].”
A new report from Canberra University‘s News & Media Research Centre also tackles this issue.
The report argues that public interest journalism should be recognised as a cultural good and a form of civic infrastructure that delivers benefits extending beyond the organisations that produce it. Like education, libraries and museums, journalism contributes to democratic accountability, informed citizenship, and social cohesion.
Because many of these public benefits are not adequately supported by market forces alone, government intervention may be justified to ensure the sustainability of the sector. The report examines the feasibility of introducing a refundable tax offset for journalists’ salaries as a mechanism to strengthen Australia’s news ecosystem.
What is ‘public interest journalism’? The report says:
While the definition of ‘public interest journalism’ has been debated, PIJI and the ACMA relied on the following:
“Public interest journalism is original content that records, reports or investigates:
▪ issues of public significance for Australians.
▪ issues relevant to engaging Australians in public debate and in informing democratic decision making.
▪ content which relates to community and local events”.
The report broadly defines public interest journalism as “news and other information which is produced and disseminated to the public according to high standards of accuracy, ethics, fairness, independence and accountability in line with best-practice journalism.”
Whether such definitions can include the kind of work we do here at radioinfo, industry trade journalism, is now clear. We think it should be.
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