Australian Newspaper History
Group Newsletter, No 105,
December 2019, p.6:
105.2.1
Facebook’s news service
The
launch of Facebook’s news service is a “powerful precedent that
will echo around editorial departments”, News Corp chief executive
Robert Thomson has declared (Australian, 28 October 2019). Thomson
said it had been a difficult decade for journalism, but Facebook’s
service was an important step. He said, “Great journalism will only
be sustainable at scale if there is a fundamental change to the
digital ecosystem. This announcement is an important step on the
road.”
News
Corp’s deal with Facebook — which covers the New York Post and
Dow Jones publications such as the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch
and Barron’s — will generate licence fees reaching into the
double-digit millions of dollars a year, people familiar with the
agreement said. “Of itself, it begins to change the terms of trade
for quality journalism, both in establishing the principle of
payment, and in allowing news organisations a clearer opportunity to
generate advertising revenue on their terms,” Thomson said. He has
led a global battle against Facebook and Google over issues including
opaque algorithms, digital advertising dominance and a failure to pay
for journalists’ work.....
Facebook’s news service launched with a test audience of 200,000 US users, but the platform plans
to roll it out beyond the US early next year. A date for launch in Australia has not been announced.
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