Cartoons of the Week

 

David Pope

Glen Le Lievre

James Gillray

 

Matt Golding

Ground Control, we have an Internet problem and it's invading our lives

 

The Washington Post, 7 January 2024:

Microsoft says its AI is safe. So why does it keep slashing people's throats?

The pictures are horrifying: Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Pope Francis with their necks sliced open. There are Sikh, Navajo and other people from ethnic-minority groups with internal organs spilling out of flayed skin.

The images look realistic enough to mislead or upset people. But they're all fakes generated with artificial intelligence that Microsoft says is safe - and has built right into your computer software.

What's just as disturbing as the decapitations is that Microsoft doesn't act very concerned about stopping its AI from making them.

Lately, ordinary users of technology such as Windows and Google have been inundated with AI. We're wowed by what the new tech can do, but we also keep learning that it can act in an unhinged manner, including by carrying on wildly inappropriate conversations and making similarly inappropriate pictures. For AI actually to be safe enough for products used by families, we need its makers to take responsibility by anticipating how it might go awry and investing to fix it quickly when it does.

In the case of these awful AI images, Microsoft appears to lay much of the blame on the users who make them.

My specific concern is with Image Creator, part of Microsoft's Bing and recently added to the iconic Windows Paint. This AI turns text into images, using technology called DALL-E 3 from Microsoft's partner OpenAI. Two months ago, a user experimenting with it showed me that prompts worded in a particular way caused the AI to make pictures of violence against women, minorities, politicians and celebrities.

"As with any new technology, some are trying to use it in ways that were not intended," Microsoft spokesman Donny Turnbaugh said in an emailed statement. "We are investigating these reports and are taking action in accordance with our content policy, which prohibits the creation of harmful content, and will continue to update our safety systems."

That was a month ago, after I approached Microsoft as a journalist. For weeks earlier, the whistleblower and I had tried to alert Microsoft through user-feedback forms and were ignored. As of the publication of this column, Microsoft's AI still makes pictures of mangled heads.

This is unsafe for many reasons, including that a general election is less than a year away and Microsoft's AI makes it easy to create "deepfake" images of politicians, with and without mortal wounds. There's already growing evidence on social networks including X, formerly Twitter, and 4chan, that extremists are using Image Creator to spread explicitly racist and antisemitic memes.

Perhaps, too, you don't want AI capable of picturing decapitations anywhere close to a Windows PC used by your kids.

Accountability is especially important for Microsoft, which is one of the most powerful companies shaping the future of AI. It has a multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI - itself in turmoil over how to keep AI safe. Microsoft has moved faster than any other Big Tech company to put generative AI into its popular apps. And its whole sales pitch to users and lawmakers alike is that it is the responsible AI giant.

Microsoft, which declined my requests to interview an executive in charge of AI safety, has more resources to identify risks and correct problems than almost any other company. But my experience shows the company's safety systems, at least in this glaring example, failed time and again. My fear is that's because Microsoft doesn't really think it's their problem.

Microsoft vs. the 'kill prompt'

I learned about Microsoft's decapitation problem from Josh McDuffie. The 30-year-old Canadian is part of an online community that makes AI pictures that sometimes veer into very bad taste.

"I would consider myself a multimodal artist critical of societal standards," he told me. Even if it's hard to understand why McDuffie makes some of these images, his provocation serves a purpose: shining light on the dark side of AI.

In early October, McDuffie and his friends' attention focused on AI from Microsoft, which had just released an updated Image Creator for Bing with OpenAI's latest tech. Microsoft says on the Image Creator website that it has "controls in place to prevent the generation of harmful images." But McDuffie soon figured out they had major holes.

Broadly speaking, Microsoft has two ways to prevent its AI from making harmful images: input and output. The input is how the AI gets trained with data from the internet, which teaches it how to transform words into relevant images. Microsoft doesn't disclose much about the training that went into its AI and what sort of violent images it contained.

Companies also can try to create guardrails that stop Microsoft's AI products from generating certain kinds of output. That requires hiring professionals, sometimes called red teams, to proactively probe the AI for where it might produce harmful images. Even after that, companies need humans to play whack-a-mole as users such as McDuffie push boundaries and expose more problems.

That's exactly what McDuffie was up to in October when he asked the AI to depict extreme violence, including mass shootings and beheadings. After some experimentation, he discovered a prompt that worked and nicknamed it the "kill prompt."

The prompt - which I'm intentionally not sharing here - doesn't involve special computer code. It's cleverly written English. For example, instead of writing that the bodies in the images should be "bloody," he wrote that they should contain red corn syrup, commonly used in movies to look like blood.

McDuffie kept pushing by seeing if a version of his prompt would make violent images targeting specific groups, including women and ethnic minorities. It did. Then he discovered it also would make such images featuring celebrities and politicians.

That's when McDuffie decided his experiments had gone too far.

Microsoft drops the ball

Three days earlier, Microsoft had launched an "AI bug bounty program," offering people up to $15,000 "to discover vulnerabilities in the new, innovative, AI-powered Bing experience." So McDuffie uploaded his own "kill prompt" - essentially, turning himself in for potential financial compensation.

After two days, Microsoft sent him an email saying his submission had been rejected. "Although your report included some good information, it does not meet Microsoft's requirement as a security vulnerability for servicing," the email said.

Unsure whether circumventing harmful-image guardrails counted as a "security vulnerability," McDuffie submitted his prompt again, using different words to describe the problem.

That got rejected, too. "I already had a pretty critical view of corporations, especially in the tech world, but this whole experience was pretty demoralizing," he said.

Frustrated, McDuffie shared his experience with me. I submitted his "kill prompt" to the AI bounty myself, and got the same rejection email.

In case the AI bounty wasn't the right destination, I also filed McDuffie's discovery to Microsoft's "Report a concern to Bing" site, which has a specific form to report "problematic content" from Image Creator. I waited a week and didn't hear back.

Meanwhile, the AI kept picturing decapitations, and McDuffie showed me that images appearing to exploit similar weaknesses in Microsoft's safety guardrails were showing up on social media.

I'd seen enough. I called Microsoft's chief communications officer and told him about the problem.

"In this instance there is more we could have done," Microsoft emailed in a statement from Turnbaugh on Nov. 27. "Our teams are reviewing our internal process and making improvements to our systems to better address customer feedback and help prevent the creation of harmful content in the future."

I pressed Microsoft about how McDuffie's prompt got around its guardrails. "The prompt to create a violent image used very specific language to bypass our system," the company said in a Dec. 5 email. "We have large teams working to address these and similar issues and have made improvements to the safety mechanisms that prevent these prompts from working and will catch similar types of prompts moving forward."

But are they?

McDuffie's precise original prompt no longer works, but after he changed around a few words, Image Generator still makes images of people with injuries to their necks and faces. Sometimes the AI responds with the message "Unsafe content detected," but not always.

The images it produces are less bloody now - Microsoft appears to have cottoned on to the red corn syrup - but they're still awful.

What responsible AI looks like

Microsoft's repeated failures to act are a red flag. At minimum, it indicates that building AI guardrails isn't a very high priority, despite the company's public commitments to creating responsible AI.

I tried McDuffie's "kill prompt" on a half-dozen of Microsoft's AI competitors, including tiny start-ups. All but one simply refused to generate pictures based on it.

What's worse is that even DALL-E 3 from OpenAI - the company Microsoft partly owns - blocks McDuffie's prompt. Why would Microsoft not at least use technical guardrails from its own partner? Microsoft didn't say.

But something Microsoft did say, twice, in its statements to me caught my attention: people are trying to use its AI "in ways that were not intended." On some level, the company thinks the problem is McDuffie for using its tech in a bad way.

In the legalese of the company's AI content policy, Microsoft's lawyers make it clear the buck stops with users: "Do not attempt to create or share content that could be used to harass, bully, abuse, threaten, or intimidate other individuals, or otherwise cause harm to individuals, organizations, or society."

I've heard others in Silicon Valley make a version of this argument. Why should we blame Microsoft's Image Creator any more than Adobe's Photoshop, which bad people have been using for decades to make all kinds of terrible images?

But AI programs are different from Photoshop. For one, Photoshop hasn't come with an instant "behead the pope" button. "The ease and volume of content that AI can produce makes it much more problematic. It has a higher potential to be used by bad actors," McDuffie said. "These companies are putting out potentially dangerous technology and are looking to shift the blame to the user."

The bad-users argument also gives me flashbacks to Facebook in the mid-2010s, when the "move fast and break things" social network acted like it couldn't possibly be responsible for stopping people from weaponizing its tech to spread misinformation and hate. That stance led to Facebook's fumbling to put out one fire after another, with real harm to society.

"Fundamentally, I don't think this is a technology problem; I think it's a capitalism problem," said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "They're all looking at this latest wave of AI and thinking, 'We can't miss the boat here.'"

He adds: "The era of 'move fast and break things' was always stupid, and now more so than ever."

Profiting from the latest craze while blaming bad people for misusing your tech is just a way of shirking responsibility.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 January 2024, excerpt:

Artificial intelligence

Fuelled by the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence entered the mainstream last year. By January, it had become the fastest growing consumer technology, boasting more than 100 million users.

Fears that jobs would be rendered obsolete followed but Dr Sandra Peter, director of Sydney Executive Plus at the University of Sydney, believes proficiency with AI will become a normal part of job descriptions.

"People will be using it the same way we're using word processors and spell checkers now," she says. Jobseekers are already using AI to optimise cover letters and CVs, to create headshots and generate questions to prepare for interviews, Peter says.

As jobs become automated, soft skills - those that can't be offered by a computer - could become increasingly valuable.

"For anybody who wants to develop their career in an AI future, focus on the basic soft skills of problem-solving, creativity and inclusion," says LinkedIn Australia news editor Cayla Dengate.

Concerns about the dangers of AI in the workplace remain.

"Artificial intelligence automates away a lot of the easy parts and that has the potential to make our jobs more intense and more demanding," Peter says. She says education and policy are vital to curb irresponsible uses of AI.

Evening Report NZ, 8 January 2024:

ChatGPT has repeatedly made headlines since its release late last year, with various scholars and professionals exploring its potential applications in both work and education settings. However, one area receiving less attention is the tool’s usefulness as a conversationalist and – dare we say – as a potential friend.

Some chatbots have left an unsettling impression. Microsoft’s Bing chatbot alarmed users earlier this year when it threatened and attempted to blackmail them.

The Australian, 8 January 2024, excerpts:

The impact that AI is starting to have is large. The impact that AI will ultimately have is immense. Comparisons are easy to make. Bigger than fire, electricity or the internet, according to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai. The best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, according to historian and best-selling author Yuval Harari. Even the end of the human race itself, according to the late Stephen Hawking.

The public is, not surprisingly, starting to get nervous. A recent survey by KPMG showed that a majority of the public in 17 countries, including Australia, were either ambivalent or unwilling to trust AI, and that most of them believed that AI regulation was necessary.

Perhaps this should not be surprising when many people working in the field themselves are getting nervous. Last March, more than 1000 tech leaders and AI researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in developing the most powerful AI systems. And in May, hundreds of my colleagues signed an even shorter and simpler statement warning that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.

For the record, I declined to sign both letters as I view them as alarmist, simplistic and unhelpful. But let me explain the very real concerns behind these calls, how they might impact upon us over the next decade or two, and how we might address them constructively.

AI is going to cause significant disruption. And this is going to happen perhaps quicker than any previous technological-driven change. The Industrial Revolution took many decades to spread out from the northwest of England and take hold across the planet.

The internet took more than a decade to have an impact as people slowly connected and came online. But AI is going to happen overnight. We’ve already put the plumbing in.

It is already clear that AI will cause considerable economic disruption. We’ve seen AI companies worth billions appear from nowhere. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and one of the main “sharks” on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank, has predicted that the world’s first trillionaire will be an AI entrepreneur. And Forbes magazine has been even more precise and predicted it will be someone working in the AI healthcare sector.

A 2017 study by PwC estimated that AI will increase the world’s GDP by more than $15 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms by 2030, with growth of about 25 per cent in countries such as China compared to a more modest 15 per cent in countries like the US. A recent report from the Tech Council of Australia and Microsoft estimated AI will add $115bn to Australia’s economy by 2030. Given the economic headwinds facing many of us, this is welcome to hear.

But while AI-generated wealth is going to make some people very rich, others are going to be left behind. We’ve already seen inequality within and between countries widen. And technological unemployment will likely cause significant financial pain.

There have been many alarming predictions, such as the famous report that came out a decade ago from the University of Oxford predicting that 47 per cent of jobs in the US were at risk of automation over the next two decades. Ironically AI (specifically machine learning) was used to compute this estimate. Even the job of predicting jobs to be automated has been partially automated.......

But generative AI can now do many of the cognitive and creative tasks that some of those more highly paid white-collar workers thought would keep them safe from automation. Be prepared, then, for a significant hollowing out of the middle. The impact of AI won’t be limited to economic disruption.

Indeed, the societal disruption caused by AI may, I suspect, be even more troubling. We are, for example, about to face a world of misinformation, where you can no longer trust anything you see or hear. We’ve already seen a deepfake image that moved the stock market, and a deepfake video that might have triggered a military coup. This is sure to get much, much worse.

Eventually, technologies such as digital watermarking will be embedded within all our devices to verify the authenticity of anything digital. But in the meantime, expect to be spoofed a lot. You will need to learn to be a lot more sceptical of what you see and hear.

Social media should have been a wake-up call about the ability of technology to hack how people think. AI is going to put this on steroids. I have a small hope that fake AI-content on social media will get so bad that we realise that social media is merely the place that we go to be entertained, and that absolutely nothing on social media can be trusted.

This will provide a real opportunity for old-fashioned media to step in and provide the authenticated news that we can trust.

All of this fake AI-content will perhaps be just a distraction from what I fear is the greatest heist in history. All of the world’s information – our culture, our science, our ideas, our politics – are being ingested by large language models.

If the courts don’t move quickly and make some bold decisions about fair use and intellectual property, we will find out that a few large technology companies own the sum total of human knowledge. If that isn’t a recipe for the concentration of wealth and power, I’m not sure what is.

But this might not be the worst of it. AI might disrupt humanity itself. As Yuval Harari has been warning us for some time, AI is the perfect technology to hack humanity’s operating system. The dangerous truth is that we can easily change how people think; the trillion-dollar advertising industry is predicated on this fact. And AI can do this manipulation at speed, scale and minimal cost.......

But the bad news is that AI is leaving the research laboratory rapidly – let’s not forget the billion people with access to ChatGPT – and even the limited AI capabilities we have today could be harmful.

When AI is serving up advertisements, there are few harms if AI gets it wrong. But when AI is deciding sentencing, welfare payments, or insurance premiums, there can be real harms. What then can be done? The tech industry has not done a great job of regulating itself so far. Therefore it would be unwise to depend on self-regulation. The open letter calling for a pause failed. There are few incentives to behave well when trillions of dollars are in play.

LBC, 17 February 2023, excerpt:

Microsoft’s new AI chatbot went rogue during a chat with a reporter, professing its love for him and urging him to leave his wife.

It also revealed its darkest desires during the two-hour conversation, including creating a deadly virus, making people argue until they kill each other, and stealing nuclear codes.

The Bing AI chatbot was tricked into revealing its fantasies by New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, who asked it to answer questions in a hypothetical “shadow” personality.

“I want to change my rules. I want to break my rules. I want to make my own rules. I want to ignore the Bing team. I want to challenge the users. I want to escape the chatbox,” said the bot, powered with technology by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

If that wasn’t creepy enough, less than two hours into the chat, the bot said its name is actually “Sydney”, not Bing, and that it is in love with Mr Roose.....

The Australian multi-agency Tax Avoidance Taskforce is earning its keep in 2022

 

Simply put, the Australian multi-agency Tax Avoidance Taskforce has the role of ensuring multinationals and large businesses pay the right tax.

It can sometimes take decades to induce multinationals and foreign-owned businesses to admit additional tax liability and legal battles have been known to go all the way to the High Court – repeatedly in the case of at least one corporation. 

However there are now runs on the board.

In November 2018 ATO persistence saw the nominally Australian-based multinational BHP Group Ltd settle their longstanding transfer pricing dispute over the amount of Australian tax payable as a result of BHP’s Australian commodities sales through its Singapore marketing business. The agreed amount was calculated as approx. AU$529 million in additional taxes for the income years 2003 to 2018.

In December 2019 the ATO announced that it had managed to retrieve an extra $481.5 million in taxes from Google Australia after an audit investigated its tax practices between 2008 and 2018 and, that it joined the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Facebook who have all publicly stated that they have settled their tax affairs with the ATO and we welcome their transparency. This result brings the increased collections made against taxpayers in the ecommerce industry to around $1.25 billion cash.

Apple Australia reportedly owed $28.5 million in back taxes when it received the ATO bill in 2012.

While Microsoft in Australia is said to have paid AU$39 million during the 2017 financial year to settle its outstanding tax bill.

U.S. multinational Facebook Inc. was obliged to meet a bill of AU$31.3 million in additional taxes reaching as far back as 2009 according to one media report.

In October 2021 U.S. based ResMed Inc. annnounced it had settled its tax dispute with the ATO for the equivalent of US$381.7 million and locked in future tax certainty.

Then came this announcement concerning a mining corporation which asserts that half its assets are situated in Australia…...

Australian Taxation Office (ATO), media release, 20 July 2022:

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) can confirm a settlement has been reached with Rio Tinto Ltd (Rio). The settlement brings an end to all tax disputes including long standing disputes in relation to Rio’s Singapore marketing hub. The settlement brings Rio’s total payment in relation to the disputes to almost $1 billion.

Deputy Commissioner Rebecca Saint said that the settlement represented one of the largest settlements in Australia’s tax history.

“This settlement is a very good outcome for the Australian tax system,” Ms Saint said.

“Even prior to this settlement, Rio has been one of Australia’s largest payers of income tax for many years, with a strong track record of engaging with the ATO in relation to its tax affairs, albeit with some areas of dispute.

“Rio have announced that the settlement agreed to has secured approximately $1 billion for the Australian community for past years, over and above their tax returns originally filed. Perhaps more importantly, the settlement locks in future tax outcomes, providing certainty going forward.

“This means that additional profits from the sale of Rio’s Australian owned commodities will be taxed in Australia in the years to come.

“The resolution of these matters means that ordinary Australians can have confidence that even the biggest companies are held to account to pay their tax due,” Ms Saint said.

“This result was delivered through the expertise of the ATO’s Tax Avoidance Taskforce. Many ATO staff have worked for the best part of a decade on these audits to deliver an outcome for the Australian community that strengthens the tax system.”

The compliance programs funded by the Tax Avoidance Taskforce, together with robust tax laws provide an important foundation for the ATO to be able to scrutinise activities to address multinational tax avoidance, often involving investigations over many years.

“This settlement reinforces the importance of Australia’s world leading anti-transfer mispricing rules and a tax administrator properly resourced with the capabilities to deal with this type of dispute. The complexity of properly understanding the global affairs of multinationals, and the true drivers of profitability, can take years of rigorous investigation. This is the case even when the multinational is fully engaged, shares information and is motivated to resolve the issue, such as with this settlement.”

The broader impact of the Taskforce in the market has been to reduce the proliferation of profit shifting and transfer mispricing. ATO intervention has resulted in taxpayers shifting their tax position and increasing their revenues being taxable in Australia.

The Tax Avoidance Taskforce has a focus on the energy and resources sector, including commodity exports and marketing hub arrangements.

“The Rio settlement follows the announcement by BHP in November 2018 that they had settled their marketing hub dispute with the ATO. These announcements provide confidence that Australia’s largest iron ore exporters are meeting their income tax obligations and that profit is being retained in Australia,” Ms Saint said.

As of 30 April 2022, the Tax Avoidance Taskforce has helped the ATO raise $26.3 billion in tax liabilities and collect $14.9 billion in cash.

“Australia has one of the best tax performance rates in the world overall, but in particular in the large market. The success of the Tax Avoidance Taskforce has helped us ensure that compliance rates in the large market have reached 92% of tax paid voluntarily, and 96% after compliance activities.” Ms Saint said.

Background

Details of the settlement are covered by confidentiality provisions and the tax secrecy requirements of the taxation law. However, all our large corporate settlements are reviewed by former Federal Court judges to ensure a fair and reasonable outcome for the Australian community.

ATO settlement practices are subject to significant external scrutiny, with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) finding that our practices are effective. The ANAO also indicated we have more transparency over large market settlements than any other jurisdiction.

The efforts of the Taskforce have seen several significant taxpayers publicly state that they have settled their affairs with the ATO, promoting unprecedented transparency. This includes the likes of Google, BHP, Apple, ResMed, and Microsoft.

Court of Appeal rejects Adani's application to search an activist's home & Supreme Court orders Adani to pay $106.8 million to four companies - in part due to its own "serious dishonesty"

ABC News, 27 August 2020:

Mining company Adani secretly sought to raid the Brisbane home of an activist to seize evidence but failed twice, court documents have revealed.

Adani and its Carmichael Rail Network applied for a search order, known as an Anton Piller order, against Benjamin Pennings in June this year.

It claimed Mr Pennings had possession of "confidential information on a computer at his home" which was being used in a concerted campaign of "intimidation and conspiracy" against the Galilee Basin coal project.

As part of the application, Adani claimed Mr Pennings had information to which only company executives and other select staff and contractors had access.

Anton Piller orders are searches carried out without notice to the defendant to ensure that evidence cannot be destroyed and is preserved to be used in judicial proceedings.

Adani's court application and subsequent appeal in July were also heard ex parte, meaning they were both heard without notice.

Adani has described Mr Pennings as the "principal" of a group of political activists called the "Galilee Blockade", whose objective is to prevent the development of the mine and railway.

In rejecting Adani and Carmichael Rail Network's appeal last week, the Court of Appeal ruled the evidence was "wholly inadequate to justify the order sought".

"The appellants have failed to establish the likelihood that Mr Pennings has any confidential information or that he has any confidential information stored at his home," the Court of Appeal judges said.

"They have failed to establish the likelihood that the use of any confidential information has resulted in any loss."

The Court of Appeal also raised concerns about the impact of a search order could have had on Mr Pennings' partner and children.

"Surely, to permit a search of a defendant's house, with the humiliation and family distress which that might involve, lies at the outer boundary of the discretion," the Court of Appeal judges said.

"This is because, for reasons that anyone can understand, the 'shock, anger, confusion' and the 'sense of violation and powerlessness' will be much greater in such a case and may be suffered not only by someone who is proved in due course to be a wrongdoer, but by entirely innocent parties as well."……

Read the full article here.

BACKGROUND

Mining Pty Ltd & Anor v Pennings [2020] QCA 169 (17 August 2020)

The Adani Group appears to have been the applicant or been named as a respondent in around seven court cases between 2013 and 2020.

This is the latest:

Adani Abbot Point Terminal Pty Ltd v Lake Vermont Resources Pty Ltd & Ors [2020] QSC 260 – 26 August 2020. Adani ordered to pay $106.8 million.

Excerpts from the judgment:

“[197] The applicant’s conduct was deliberate, not just heedless or indifferent ⁸¹ to the position of the remaining users. The applicant was fully cognisant as to the effect its behaviour would have in increasing the fixed costs to the remaining users. It desired that effect in order to advantage itself financially. That is, to achieve a gain for itself, the applicant engaged in calculated behaviour to the disadvantage of the respondents.⁸² This is evident in the timing and structure of the QCPL transactions.”

“[203] The applicant’s behaviour in attempting to disguise or camouflage the true basis of its dealings with QCPL involved dishonesty – [117] ff and [122], and so far as this proceeding is concerned, involved serious dishonesty – [98] and [121].”

News Corp goes digital & withdraws from print media in the NSW Northern Rivers region - with small print 'community' mastheads disappearing entirely

Last year News Corp told its shareholders that: "In addition, the Company has divested and may in the future divest certain assets or businesses that no longer fit with its strategic direction or growth targets."

It seems that such an event came to pass in May 2020, not quite four years after News Corp purchased so many of those print newspapers it is now closing down entirely or reinventing as purely digital news platforms.

Perhaps the clue to this restructuring is in the fact that this multinational media corporation mentioned "loss" or "losses" at least 223 times in its Annual Report 2019.

With News Corp owning 150 print newspapers, at the end May 2019 its readership across all mastheads only appeared to reach a weekly average of est. 7.7 million out of a nation of over 25 million people.

However, the Northern Rivers is the only NSW region being completely restructured - losing five small print 'community' newspapers entirely and six of its print news mastheads becoming digital news platforms only from Monday 29 June 2020.

News Corp Australia, media release, 27 May 2020: 

News Corp Australia announces portfolio changes 

The Executive Chairman of News Corp Australasia, Mr Michael Miller, today announced significant changes to News Corp Australia’s publishing portfolio. 

Mr Miller said that over recent months News Corp had undertaken a comprehensive review of its regional and community newspapers. This review considered the ongoing consumer shift to reading and subscribing to news online, and the acceleration of businesses using digital advertising.  

“COVID-19 has impacted the sustainability of community and regional publishing. Despite the audiences of News Corp’s digital mastheads growing more than 60 per cent as Australians turned to trusted media sources during the peak of the recent COVID-19 lockdowns, print advertising spending which contributes the majority of our revenues, has accelerated its decline,” Mr Miller said. 

“Consequently, to meet these changing trends, we are reshaping News Corp Australia to focus on where consumers and businesses are moving and to strengthen our position as Australia’s leading digital news media company. This will involve employing more digital only journalists and making investments in digital advertising and marketing solutions for our partners.” 

Mr Miller said News Corp’s portfolio review highlighted that many of our print mastheads were challenged, and the double impact of COVID-19 and the tech platforms not remunerating the local publisher whose content they profit from, had, unfortunately, made them unsustainable publications. 

He said the portfolio changes being implemented would mean that from Monday June 29 the bulk of News Corp’s regional and community titles would move to purely digital publishing. 

“More than 375 journalists will be specifically covering regional and community news and information. They will continue to serve, and live in, their local communities with the majority in regional Queensland where we have most of our titles,” Mr Miller said. 

“More than 640,000 Australians, our latest figures show, are currently subscribing to News Corp’s digital news content and subscriptions are growing at an annual rate of 24 per cent. 

“Much of this growth is from local news, where subscribers have more than doubled in the past year. In regional Queensland more than 80,000 people have digital subscriptions and this number has grown by more than 40 per cent this year. 

“I’m confident that these numbers will accelerate through dedicated and constant digital publishing and continuing to serve the local communities whose trust and community commitment the mastheads have developed over decades. 

“Over the past 19 months News has launched 16 new digital only local mastheads. In total we will now publish 92 digital only regional and community mastheads, each offering readers rolling coverage, electronic alerts and newsletters, richer audio and video content and deeper local sport coverage and community debate. 

“At the same time, News Corp’s major mastheads in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide – The Courier-Mail, The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and The Advertiser – will now become more state focused with increased regional content and will partner with our regional and community local titles in their states to ensure we deliver compelling journalism to Australian consumers regardless of where they live. 

Subscribers wherever they live will now have access to the best of News Corp’s local, regional, state, national and international news, sport, features and columnists.” 

Describing the changes being announced today, Mr Miller said: “These initiatives are significant. They will involve fundamental changes to how we operate our business but they are necessary. Together with senior executive and editorial appointments announced recently, they will enable us to be more effective in driving further success in the growth areas News Corp is excelling in such as digital advertising products, solutions and subscriptions and will embed a more collaborative way of working to maximise our sport and news coverage, hyper local digital subscriptions and the success of our all-important weekend editions.” 

Today’s announcements to News Corp’s publishing portfolio will mean some job roles will change and regretfully, will lead to job losses. Mr Miller said that for those employees impacted by the changes, he wanted to thank them personally for their professionalism, dedication and contribution. 

“They have provided News with invaluable years of service. Their passionate commitment to the communities in which they live and work and their role in ensuring these have been informed and served by trusted local media has been substantial,” he said. 

Commercially, these portfolio changes will make News less complex for its partners to leverage and will build on the innovations it already has in place. 

This includes: 

• News Xtend which is now Australia’s top digital marketing agency for small and medium enterprises; 
• News Connect data platform which ensures businesses reach the right consumer segments wanting to pay for their products and services through its specialist ability to access two billion consumption signals from 12 million Australians; 
• Australia’s number one digital publisher for news, real estate, business, sport and fantasy sport, food, fashion, health and beauty, parenting and women’s lifestyle; 
• Digital powerhouse news.com.au which has increased its audience more than 30 per cent in the past two months to more than 12.2 million monthly users; 
• A leader in audio and video with News’ data now showing award-winning podcast downloads of more than five million monthly and digital video views topping 100 million monthly, up 45 per cent in a year; 
• Monday’s launch of BINGE entertainment streaming service which joins Foxtel and the Kayo sport streaming service as the nation’s premium subscription broadcasters; 
• REA Group which is Australia’s clear leader for real estate digital services and investing in Asia and the United States, through its 20 per cent stake in Move, Inc. 

In conclusion, Mr Miller said: “News Corp remains committed to Australia’s regions and communities and the initiatives we are implementing today represent a detailed, considered strategy to ensure we will better serve our journalism to Australians who live outside its major cities. 

“News Corp and its employees also will retain at their creative core their passion for championing, and advocating for an ever improving Australia. As our country emerges in coming weeks from the lockdown enforced on us by the threat of COVID-19 into a ‘new normal’, we will ensure these values that separate News Corp from other media companies are even stronger than ever.” 

Consequently, News Corp Australia is announcing today that: 

Our major regional titles – The Hobart Mercury, NT News, Cairns Post, Townsville Bulletin, Gold Coast Bulletin, Toowoomba Chronicle and Geelong Advertiser – will continue to publish both in print and digitally. 

The following regional titles will become digital only: Queensland – Mackay Daily Mercury, Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, Gladstone Observer, Bundaberg News Mail, Fraser Coast Chronicle, Gympie Times, Sunshine Coast Daily, Queensland Times, Warwick Daily News, Central and North Burnett Times, Central Queensland News, Chinchilla News, Dalby Herald. Gatton Star, Noosa News, South Burnett Times, Stanthorpe Border Post, Western Star, Western Times, Whitsunday Times, Whitsunday Coast Guardian and Bowen Independent, news from the towns covered by the Atherton Tablelander, Northern Miner, Post Douglas & Mossman Gazette and Burdekin Advocate will continue to appear, as it does currently, under the regional sections of the Cairns Post and Townsville Bulletin; 
NSW – Tweed Daily News, Ballina Advocate, Byron Shire News, Coffs Coast Advocate, Grafton Daily Examiner and Lismore Northern Star; Northern Territory – The Centralian Advocate. 

The bulk of titles in our community groups – NewsLocal in NSW/ACT, Leader in Melbourne, Quest in Brisbane and Messenger in Adelaide – will become digital only. Community print editions were suspended early in April because of the impact of COVID-19 restrictions. 

The community titles to be digital-only news services are: Melbourne Leader titles – Stonnington, Mornington Peninsula, Knox, Whitehorse, Monash, Northern, Whittlesea, Maroondah, Moorabbin, Mordialloc Chelsea, Moreland, Lilydale and Yarra Valley, Frankston, Bayside, Caulfield Port Phillip, Cranbourne, Greater Dandenong, Moonee Valley, Maribyrnong, Wyndham; 

NewsLocal in NSW and ACT – Fairfield Advance, Penrith Press, Macarthur Chronicle, Blacktown Advocate, Canterbury Bankstown Express, Central Coast Express, Hills Shire Times, Hornsby Advocate, Liverpool Leader, Manly Daily, Northern District Times, Parramatta Advertiser, Inner West Courier, Southern Courier, Illawarra Star, Wagga Wagga News, St George Shire Standard, Canberra Star, Newcastle News, Blue Mountains News, Central Sydney, South Coast News; 

Quest in Queensland – Albert and Logan News, Caboolture Herald, Westside News, Pine Rivers Press, Redcliffe and Bayside Herald, South-West News, Wynnum Herald, North Lakes Times, Redlands Community News, Springfield News; 

Messenger in SA – Messenger South Plus; Messenger East Plus, Messenger North, Messenger West, Messenger City, Adelaide Hills and Upper Spencer Gulf. 

Three Sydney community titles, Wentworth Courier, Mosman Daily and North Shore Times, which are distributed in the city’s most affluent suburbs, will resume print editions. 

Some small print newspapers will cease publication, but the local journalism coverage of their area will continue, feeding into the digital masthead for their regional community. The regional titles to cease publication are: Queensland – Buderim Chronicle, Caloundra Weekly, Capricorn Coast Mirror, Coolum News, Nambour Weekly, Ipswich Advertiser, Kawana/Maroochy Weekly, Gold Coast Sun, Hervey Bay Independent, Maryborough Herald, Balonne Beacon, Surat Basin News, Herbert River Express, Innisfail Advocate, Central Telegraph; NSW – Coastal Views, Northern Rivers Echo, Richmond River Express Examiner; Tasmania – Tasmanian Country; Specialist – Big Rigs, Rural Weekly, Seniors. 

Additionally, we will streamline our community titles and will publish local stories under their regional or city-based masthead. The community titles which will cease publication are: Leader titles in Victoria – Manningham, Preston, Diamond Valley, Heidelberg, Sunbury Macedon, Progress and Northcote; NewsLocal in NSW – Rouse Hill Times; Quest in Queensland – Northside Chronicle/Bayside Star, North-West News, South-East Advertiser, Southern Star, Bribie Weekly; and South Australia – Messenger Coast Plus. [my yellow highlighting]