Should media companies be funded by big tech?

6.861 - 7.982 Sarah

This is the Daily Oz.

8.383 - 9.504 Lily Madden

This is the Daily Oz.

10.305 - 11.627 Sarah

Oh, now it makes sense.

19.799 - 35.303 Sam Koslowski

Good morning and welcome to the Daily Oz. It's Monday the 4th of May. I'm Sam Kozlowski. I'm Zara Seidler. Last week, the federal government finally announced a long-awaited draft that is set to regulate the relationship between social media companies and news companies.

35.724 - 51.345 Sam Koslowski

Now, this comes after a number of years of consultation, of which TDA was a part, and it's now up to the tech companies and news companies to respond to the draft before it's set to hit parliament later in the year. And so we thought on today's podcast, we'd do something a little bit different.

131.304 - 148.146 Zara Seidler

It was around the time that you and I were both getting married and we were like really convinced the government was going to come out with something on our wedding days, our separate wedding days, we're not married to each other, about the relationship between big tech and media companies and that that was going to have huge implications for TDA. Yeah.

148.126 - 166.084 Zara Seidler

Turns out the conversation that we had back then, so that was a number of years ago now, didn't actually transpire into worst case scenario. Instead, it's all led us to here, to again, talk about media bargaining and money changing hands between big tech and media companies.

166.064 - 172.779 Sam Koslowski

Yeah. And one of the things I was thinking about in the lead up to this podcast is actually whether people deeply care or not.

173.019 - 184.123 Zara Seidler

Yeah. I had this whole conversation with the editorial team. They pitched it to write for the feed, for our Instagram feed. And I was fully convinced that not a single person outside of you and I care about it. But it turns out that was wrong.

184.103 - 200.009 Sam Koslowski

I think it's when you have these kind of two different spheres that people are very invested in, where they get their news from and how they get their news and also social media. When you get a sense that there's tensions between the two of them, when there's change on the horizon, I kind of understand now why people care.

883.589 - 900.127 Zara Seidler

Yeah, I think that's a big thing to draw on, which is that under the 2021 law, basically the large majority of the money went to Nine and News Corp, the two biggest media companies in Australia. They got millions upon millions of dollars. There wasn't a whole lot of oversight about where that was spent.

900.847 - 921.731 Zara Seidler

And, you know, publishers like TDA who, granted, we were basically tiny slash non-existent at that point, but you would have never been in those sorts of rooms. And so now the idea is, well, how are we making sure that, If there are these funds, they are actually being distributed in a way that is nourishing the sector and not just making the big players even bigger.

922.091 - 942.957 Zara Seidler

I want to end by asking you as the co-founder of The Daily Oz, what is your view on this? And I know that it's not black and white and we've been through a bit of a journey and perhaps we're even deeply, I'm just going to speak for both of us, fatigued by this conversation that has dominated, you know, basically every chat we've had since 2021. Yeah. Where are you at on it?

943.518 - 956.162 Sam Koslowski

It's very... Our emotions and our strategy in how we are approaching this is complicated because on one hand, we don't fundamentally think that media companies should get money from tech companies.

956.443 - 956.703 Zara Seidler

Why?