Today on the Future Media podcast, Alan Chapell and I are joined by one of the most influential figures when it comes to the future of journalism.
Danielle Coffey is President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance. She was just named one of the Most Powerful Women in Washington.
She’s leading a global charge on behalf of 2,000 news and magazine publishers to reshape how journalism is protected, funded and valued in the digital age.
She’s headed high-stakes negotiations with platforms, pushed for legislation, AI licensing models and lobbied the most powerful politicians to right the imbalance.
She’s a lawyer who came from telco world to bring a powerful combination of legal strategy, political savvy, and wider industry and competition insight to the table.
Her leadership marks a shift - not just in defending journalism but actively building a new sustainable economic model for it.
Whether it’s pushing for pay-per-crawl, AI deals, championing media bargaining codes, or calling out Big Tech misbehaviour giants, she’s become a central figure in the most important media policy battles of our time.
And while most industry bodies stop at sharing best practice, the News/Media Alliance is a lobbying force - unapologetically fighting to win journalism a viable and sustainable future.
But first, let’s welcome paid subs overnight from the Content Licensing Agency in the UK, Adobe, Australia’s Victorian Country Press Association, Montreal publisher Le Devoir, and The University of Alaska. Thank you.
And new free subs over the weekend from The New York Times, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, UK publisher The Telegraph, Spanish publisher 20 Minutos, the team at The Daily Mirror’s podcast Pod Save The Queen, the Director-General’s office at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Italy, Amazon in San Francisco, global CMS Blox Digital, AI podcast The Grain in Ontario, and many more.
The Big Story: The fight to save journalism
Ricky: Thanks for coming on Danielle. We should let everyone know that you and I have had a couple of conversations previously.
We share a mission to create sustainability for the news media industry, and that can be through collaboration, or through a bit of a fight.
What’s not getting us anywhere is sitting down and chatting about it. I’ve seen people trying that for years and getting nowhere.
Moaning and indignation and seeking government or philanthropic handouts simply isn’t working at scale, so we need to be more dynamic.
That’s been your approach, so please tell everyone about the News/Media Association’s mission, and why you think things need to be different.
Danielle: Thanks for having me.
In a healthy and functional marketplace, there are all kinds of partnerships and negotiations, and with a level playing field those are productive.
What we did first was diagnose the problem, and we found a broken marketplace.
Next, it was to extract new terms and conditions for the distribution of content.
News media has traditionally owned its distribution, but once that was disintermediated by platforms, the question becomes one of exchange.
We diagnosed that the regulatory landscape didn’t support a return for the publishers, so we started a conversation to see if a negotiation could take place.
When that goes nowhere, you go to the courts, then to Congress, then to the legislature.
I’m in DC, so I went to the legislature, to the Congress, also to the States…
And you try to grapple with the regulatory landscape that has failed to support a healthy marketplace.
You use levers where you can when it isn’t a balanced market - or level playing field - in order to make it functional so that it can operate the way that it’s supposed to so that innovation can thrive, content can flourish, and the responsible quality content that we depend - and that our society wants - can flourish.
Lawmakers are interested in that, so you hope you get a good outcome.
Couldn’t agree more, so my question then, is really short. Why hasn’t the industry done that for the past 20 years? It’s actually worked hard to avoid doing that.
Danielle: I don’t know.
First, there’s an awareness. If you take just the recent innovation of AI. For years publishers didn’t even know AI was using their content.
When we finally figured out that they were, we tried to stop them. Publishers tried to protect themselves. First it was terms of service.
In other cases, it was getting a fair exchange through advertising or subscriptions.
IP and copyright law is supposed to protect against derivative uses of that content so there should be an exchange.
There should be permission granted before the unauthorised use of content is made freely available and monetised by someone else.
But when that doesn’t happen, then you come to terms with that imbalanced relationship, and mobilise.
And I must give credit to my news and magazine publishers that have mobilised.
We (the industry) had already been through so many distributors of our content that reaped the benefit. AI was the final straw.
AI is an exacerbation and an existential threat on steroids compared to the previous fights, and so they mobilised.
They came to the table, ready to do what’s needed to enforce their rights.
Ricky: Amazing. Alan and I have spoken countless times on this podcast and everywhere else about the fact that the industry collectively is a big industry.
It has a big voice. And if it fights individually, it’s ants against elephants, okay? You just get crushed.
You can’t argue. But you have one of the largest groups of publishers.
And what I really like about what you’ve done is that you’ve put them on a single track.
You’ve lined them up. behind a narrative. And one of the interesting things about you, and I hope you can share, is that you don’t actually come from the media industry, right?
You are an entrant into this. Do you think that that gave you a different perspective?
Danielle: I love this industry because there’s hearts and soul in it. I came from telecom, but media impacts people’s lives.
There’s a mission to serve the public, and that’s very admirable.
But coming from telecom taught me there’s always an ROI (return on investment). There’s ARPU (average revenue per user). They’re always thinking about the return.
You can’t imagine somebody not paying for internet service or a wireless cell phone, but it’s not the same with news.
The mission is so strong in the media that it’s sometimes confused with the value exchange that it’s entitled to.
(News) isn’t free for the betterment of society, because that means you can’t reinvest, or afford to hire journalists to cover the work that needs to be covered.
I think my members come from a good place. I saw them take down their paywalls during COVID while the tech platforms reaped all the advertising revenue.
It means there are different mentalities, but both things can be true. You can have the mission of news and still do what needs to be done to support it.
When I first came, I needed to diagnose the problem before we could attempt to fix it.
And in digital news, audiences have exponentially increased over 15 years with the internet and with Google search.
Publishers have a ton of eyeballs on their content, but their revenue is headed on an opposite trajectory. It’s been going down over the same period.
Diagnosing that problem and why that was happening was the priority, and the fact is that there’s a broken marketplace,
Publishers cannot reap the benefit of the eyeballs. That’s the commonality we all now realise. Publishers have more readers than ever, but can’t make payroll.
That’s especially true for small and local individuals, but also for publications, magazines, start-ups, what have you - even the largest ones.
They all have the same problem, and they now realise that the distribution mechanism is broken.
That has allowed them to all see the common problem and come together with many different solutions.
And there are a lot. It’s not just one rifle shot. We know that. We’ve seen all the various cases and legislation, but we know now what the problem is.
That’s a cohesive funnel for them all to come together.
Alan: And ultimately, that’s the challenge. Finding a commonality of interest from which you can build a coalition. If you’re able to do that, then I think you’ve got a shot.
Corey Doctorow talks about this a bunch in his latest book, and I think there’s some validity to it.
Danielle: And there is one. There’s an elephant in the room. Ricky and I talk about it all the time.
We’re both following the same cases, and even in AI, there’s a company that’s so large it’s more powerful than many governments. Dare I even say our own in America.
The law is the only thing that can bring it down to where it should be to create a fair marketplace in the ad tech ecosystem, as well as search, AI, and the distribution of our content.
Alan: It’s still an underreported story, even now. If you look at the power of Google, it literally pushed the Competition of Markets Authority in the UK around for four years and told it to go pound sand.
I’m surprised governments are not starting to get wise to the fact that if you allow these companies to be bigger and more powerful than you, that’s not good for government.
Danielle: Yeah, that’s true.
Ricky: My belief was that as these companies became larger, a couple of obvious things would happen.
First, the publishing industry would recognise the danger. That took 15 years longer than I thought, and that was dangerously slow, and the realisation came too late.
I also believed that government would work out pretty quickly that democracy would come under threat. That also took too long.
So, I fell back on antitrust law. When the companies became so powerful and so wealthy they perverted markets, law would be enacted.
The first time I mentioned we needed antitrust action was when I was News Australia in 2004 - 21 years ago now.
Despite all that, we’ve only just seen cases come to court, and we still don’t know if the judges are going to deliver a win or a loss for publishing.
Danielle, you are a lawyer. Do you think that antitrust can stop these companies or do we still need government to step in?
Danielle: 2004 is very early, so good for you for saying it that early.
We’ve been talking about it for the past 15 years or so. Europe started 10 years ago fighting for copyright protections.
Publishing’s problems started there because regulations in the digital space didn’t make their way over from bricks and mortar to protect content like it should have.
“The US because then had a string of bad copyright laws and court rulings. The joke was: How do you win a case? You call yourself Google...”
Over and over, we had bad case law. We just did.
We tried to come together with a licensing initiative way back 13 years ago now, but we failed at coming together. I don’t think the technology was there.
There was a combination of disrupting factors of our industry, and we came to the point where we realised that copyright law has failed us.
But there’s still an unequal partnership where our content is being distributed and we’re not receiving the benefit.
And then perversely, antitrust laws protected Google because we were not allowed to come together to fight because that would be collusion.
We started fighting 10 years ago for legislation that would provide a remedy and allow us to come together.
That’s evolved over time, after Australia pioneered its bargaining code and Canada did the same. Europe also had a patchwork of laws that held Google accountable.
But in the US, we have had hesitancy. Tech has a huge lobby here. That’s not a surprise, so we haven’t been able to get the relief we need from Congress.
In parallel, courts were addressing some of the issues in the search and ad tech antitrust cases.
The search case was successfully won. The remedy - some could argue failed to hit the mark as far as really changing where Google is going to go from here.
There are follow on suits that will hopefully get us there, and then on the ad tech case, that’s still a question mark.
So, I think we’re at the end of the beginning. I don’t think it’s going to stop.
AI is the next frontier and Google going into that frontier with their cemented power is not a good idea.
That there’s an awareness that we don’t want the past to repeat itself.
Lawmakers are hearing that from others, not just us. We don’t want to enter this imbalance where Google can just force us into their terms that are to our detriment.
Ricky: You raised the Australian News Media Bargaining Code. I obviously had a front row seat to that as I’m in Sydney.
I just interviewed the code’s architect Rod Sims, the head of Australia’s competition commission, in front of a live audience on Friday, and he’ll be here on the pod soon.
We didn’t get all the way, but we really did land a blow. Google’s reaction was to threaten to shut down Google search in Australia.
Meta turned off all news sites in Australia without giving anybody any prior warning. It was very ham-fisted. It turned off domestic violence, charities, police stations, etc.
But eventually both paid - about AU$250 million a year for a couple of years, before Meta quit and pulled out. Google then shortened its multi-year deals to one year.
Now it’s stringing publishers along, and there’s a lot of risks around that.
Australia was the canary in the coal mine. Rod Sims views it as a success because publishers were paid and he created a global precedent.
Danielle, you have a fascinating perspective as you spend your time inside the beltway in Washington DC talking to politicians.
Is there political will in America to deal with this broken market? Big Tech is propping up jobs, the economy, American supremacy, AI…
There are so many reasons to do nothing. What’s the mood from the political class because it impacts on the entire world?
Danielle: There are lawmakers who value us. We absolutely have champions. It’s a long list and I’m so grateful for everything they’re doing to help us out.
Some are doing it because it’s the letter of the law, like the Department of Justice. And we’re there for them, too. They support us completely.
Journalism is critical to a healthy democracy. All sides should be heard. We represent all ideologies, so support for our industry is there.
But Congress is a stalemate. We’re exiting the longest shutdown in American history so it’s no secret (both sides) are having a hard time coming together.
That means the fight has shifted to the States, but tech has a limitless pool of resources, and so do investors, because of the AI space.
They are flooding in to use everything that they have, including shutting down their own platforms, to get out of regulation.
It’s a long history of claims that the internet will break, and let the internet be free from regulation…
Anything that hits their pocket or bottom line, they do a calculation to figure out what to do to throw lawyers at this to kill regulation.
…Anything that will outweigh the repercussions of what may happen if a law is passed. They will always throw whatever resources are necessary to thwart it.
They’re driven by their shareholders, and I don’t know if I blame them. But is it the best thing for society? No. Or the content industry? No.
It’s not even in their interest, though. That’s actually one thing that I don’t totally understand because if there’s no more resource to feed off, what do they do?
Are they OK with being a cesspool? I guess maybe that doesn’t factor in.”
Ricky: I had a conversation with board members of one of the Big Tech giants and walked away with fascinating insights.
We were talking about the future of AI and that mass adoption would only explode once AI was trusted by the public.
Today it’s still an early adopter market, and whenever horror stories emerge, everyday people decide to just wait a bit longer to use it.
I explained this reality to this board and explained that the publishing industry shared the goal to support and create the emergence of quality, trusted AI.
We shared the vision to advance the world to a greater technology, and our content was essential for that. If you bite the hand that feeds that, you’ll lose too.
I echoed the mission statement of this newsletter. Let’s get to a better future faster, together.
One of the board members who was focused on growing search said he completely agreed. It’s exactly what we need.
Immediately, another member who was from business development leapt in and said: But we can just take the content. It’s fair use and we know what the future will be.
I responded: You don’t know what the big story will be next Thursday week. What you have is emerging AI, not a time machine, and need us for timeliness and relevance.
That vehement difference of opinion within the board of one tech company explicitly exposes the scale of the problem. Money over mission. Profit over people.
I track that crazy logic to put dollars over sense here.
How do you craft a future out of that?
Danielle: The motivations of the tech platforms and AI companies goes back to your original question: What are we fighting for?
It shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter what their motivations are if they are breaking the law, and they are breaking the law.
Rights are meant to exist and the copyright protections and antitrust laws are supposed to withstand the test of time. There are reasons for those precedents.
Copyright was created in the Constitution to incentivise creation and to reap the benefit of the fruit of your labour.
We believe we have winning cases, especially with the real-time use of our content that is then used to compete with us.
Again, there’s something very perverse about that. Even the layperson can see that’s outright theft.
Tech’s taking something it doesn’t have permission to and using it to create substitute content of what it took from the creator. That’s very unfair. That’s not fair use at all.
The laws are supposed to sort that out, regardless of what the motivation is.
And despite the fact that boards are saying they should just do it if they can get away with it, that doesn’t make it lawful.
Ricky: I’ve followed all Google’s antitrust trials. I’ve watched them weave and wane, but throughout, the evidence and judgements have been crystal clear.
Google is a once, twice, three times monopolist. It lost all three cases hands down. It appealed on the app store and lost.
I was of the view that the law was going to be enacted. Justice would be served and change would ensue.
Then the remedies in the search antitrust trial turned out to be a slap on the wrist. The judge accepted that bad things happened, and competition was failing, and the law was broken…
Then he said Google had done terrible things and monopolised a market and people suffered, but I’ll ignore that you need to compete in AI.
He chose not to deal with the illegality but instead make a bet on the future technology. That’s not the judge’s role and it’s not the court’s job.
We have competition law that took 125 years to mature, but he decided not to use that, and to look forward instead. Overnight, half a trillion dollars was added to Big Tech valuations.
I wrote Sinners are grinners as judge spares multiple-monopolist Google. How am I and the industry meant to read that?
Danielle: You and I have talked previously about the selling of Chrome, and you have some really good points there.
You’ll recall that we also emphasised the need for an AI opt-out for publishers, otherwise tech cements its power in the future using AI and leveraging search.
Google tells publishers if you don’t give us your content for AI, you won’t be found in search.
I filed a video alert on this live from Times Square New York as soon as I saw this.
Danielle: Cases have been filed about reciprocal dealing, and tying, and one would think that the remedy would have addressed that.
I would have hoped it would have. We had good arguments. However, the main issue there was timing.
If you recall, judge Mehta said there wasn’t enough evidence. And if I think about AI Overviews, Google was a little bit late to the game. It was scrutinised for it.
AI Overviews launched only a handful of months prior to the remedies trial, so one could question whether there was enough data on its impact. AI mode wasn’t even born.
So you could venture to guess that it was a timing issue, which is why you’ve seen court cases that follow on this specific issue, like Penske…
Ricky: Judge Amit Mehta said in his ruling that he could clearly see AI Overviews had an unfair impact on the publishing industry.
I can see it, he said, but no publisher gave evidence in my court to explain the damage, so I’m not going to do anything about it.
The judge said it represents an “existential problem” as publishers lose money but have “little choice but to allow Google to crawl their content”.
He added: “Publishers cannot opt out of Google’s use of their content for display in AI Overviews.”
But on page 209, he said: “The court heard evidence about Google’s opt-out offerings, but no testimony from a single publisher.
“The court does not doubt that publishers face new challenges because of GenAI technologies, but there can be no cure without evidence to support it.”
This infuriates me because we can be smarter. I know how proud our industry is, and how its immediate mission often blinds it sometimes to longer term strategy.
It believes in the separation of Church and State. It thinks about readers before shareholders. Not about the money, and more about the story.
Is that a luxury that the industry can no longer afford, because it feels that what it should do.
And it’s up to us as warriors to step up on their behalf. That’s how I view you and the News/Media Alliance.
What’s your view of the mood of publishers? You interact at the C-suite and board level. What’s their mood?
Is it anger? Is it mobilisation? Are they aligned? Ready to go? Are they armed with shovels and burning torches?
Danielle: I’ll note that they were much quicker with AI to realise that this is going to be a problem.
I don’t know if that’s because AI was so bad or because they realised it was a repeat of the past.
For whatever realised there is a mobilisation individually and collectively around court cases - and even more recently. Business Insider just joined Gannett’s case.
They’re coming together in a lot of ways and realising together that they do need to protect their content.
Crawlers are coming in massive droves vacuuming up content from behind paywalls, disregarding terms of service, disguising themselves… There are some really bad actors.
Now we also have technology partners doing a great job, like Cloudflare and TollBit empowering the publishers to protect their content.
“If being an answer engine is driven by access to the most unique content and I’m Google, I’m gonna be first to do deals so our’s is better than everybody else” - Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in Future Media earlier this month
Publishers have come together. They’ve realised at the same time independently that scarcity is a condition to value.
Content that’s already been taken we need to sort through, but real time breaking news stories. That can’t predict what’s going to happen Thursday that you mentioned, that’s of the highest value.
Ricky: Does this mean we’re reaching the end game?
If Big Tech makes any major announcement, it adds $200 billion to its market cap, and that feels bad, only it misses something.
We are reaching the point where they are reaching saturation. They are running out of audiences, out of valuation growth, and out of time with the legal net closing.
Does this mean they’ll realise that they need new content to train. They need new content to satisfy their consumers. They want their tech used to monetise it.
Are we arriving at the realisation that fighting gets everyone nowhere?
Danielle: I think you have seen that. A few dozen of my companies are making these business deals that are setting the precedent that it can happen.
And we’ve created a licensing structure - a collective license - because we represent all of industry to demonstrate that it’s possible at scale.
And that’s especially true for forward looking, real-time breaking news, but training as well.
So, I have seen some bright spots.
Ricky: Yeah, I have too.
So are you saying that you’ve got a blueprint for how you might want to think about
putting a contract together for AI?
And where would people be able to find that?
Danielle: Yeah. We have. Our first one was announced with ProRata because it’s such a good actor.
A lot of those terms and conditions are logical. We have a great legal team in addition to our lobbying team.
They’re experts in this and have put together a very solid set of terms that protect a company’s content with a lot of terms you may not think about, like attribution and are you able to get your content back in the future?
So many things that need to be thought about when entering into these types of agreements.
And don’t forget, we represent a lot of small companies who may not have the resources.
Another thing I’ve seen, speaking of coming together, was that we held an event at The Washington Post where their experts, The New York Times and Condé Nast did an all-day session talking to mid-sized publishers about how they protect their content.
Ricky: All of those companies you just mentioned I talk to regularly, and you’re right, there is a change happening where they are starting to work collaboratively.
The idea of The Washington Post, NY Times and Gannett getting in a room together to have a chat. would have been inconceivable even two years ago…
Danielle: I have one better for you. We ran an ad campaign about how AIs stealing American content was not innovation, and 800 outlets across the country ran it.
It reached hundreds of millions of readers and millions in print, but what was most interesting to me was that both The New York Times and The New York Post ran it.
That was neat to see because they don’t come together on a lot of things, but they agree on that.
Ricky: You mentioned earlier your work with telcos. It’s probably not that hard to bring five telco companies together, but together they have a loud voice.
If the publishing industry collaborates, how big an elephant is it against Big Tech? How much political weight can it carry? How loud is its voice, do you think?
Danielle: Voters are already with us. You can see it in the polls. They already agree there needs to be guardrails, and protections around content and flagrant use by AI.
People are also interested in their own personal information being used by AI.
While people are using some of these products already, the more it’s in your household, the more you worry about how it can impact your life.
That’s why government should step in, so from a messaging perspective, coming together is easy. As I said 800 outlets came together to reach hundreds of millions.
But building a marketplace, that’s impossible. They can’t come together unless it’s pro-competitive and the AI company comes to the collective license voluntarily.
It can’t be forced. That’s not possible for us to come together and legally require. And who will never come is Google, even if we collectively came together.
Laws are required to bring Google to the table because there’s just no incentive for it to otherwise.
That’s when the government steps in, and when the courts step up.
Ricky: One innovation in Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code was that the regulator changed the law to allow publishers to negotiate collectively.
It removed the cartel rules so publishers could fight together to level the playing field with the tech giants.
It also required tech to attend meetings and negotiate in good faith. If they didn’t, the decision would go to an arbiter who would decide what payment is due.
It removed the optionality for tech to play tough or badly. It made playing fairly the better business decision. It was behave, or else.
Do you think that’s a good structure? Is it even possible to do that in the US?
Danielle: We tried. We were actually fighting in parallel with Rod (Sims of the ACCC) and his amazing work that underpinned years of work that followed.
And don’t forget they tried voluntary first. That didn’t work so well. Google just didn’t show up, so they went to an involuntary bargaining code.
Same thing in Europe, and then the Digital Markets Act, and also in Canada.
Ten years ago, we were the first to come up with legislation that allowed for collective publisher bargaining - the JCPA, Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.
That was one of the first times the industry really came together, and it got incredibly close. What followed was the lobbying power of Google and Facebook.
What resulted was a fund and a marketplace with a little codification, a little legislation backing it up.
What Australia did beautifully was use the fear of baseball style arbitration. It’s the same reason why Google fears a jury verdict.
Ricky: Yeah, so let’s talk about baseball arbitration and put it into layman’s terms.
You put everyone in a room to collectively bargain. If you don’t reach an agreement, or if Big Tech doesn’t play nice, it goes to that independent arbiter.
All the publishers put the number they want from tech in a sealed envelope and hand it to the arbiter who randomly picks one - and that’s what they have to pay.
It’s a huge jeopardy risk that forces the dominant partner to negotiate or face potentially catastrophic consequences. Is that a fair shorthand?
Danielle: Yeah. The only thing I’d add is it incentivises a fair offer for fear that the other guy wins.
Ricky: Rod said something to me on Friday night that will stick with me forever.
He said tech isn’t afraid of legal enforcers. That’s why they talk about enforcers in all their quotes. Whenever they’re talking in court, it’s enforcers, enforcers…
Confused, I asked Rod: Well, they are enforcers, aren’t they?
No, he said. What tech’s really afraid of is regulators, because regulators can change the law.
Enforcers just enforce what’s already there, and as tech has all the lawyers, time and money, that’s something it can combat.
But if they don’t know the law they are fighting, or the maximum penalty that can be imposed through new regulation, that changes the power balance.
Do you think that’s right?
Danielle: Well, we’ve come full circle to the first question. We are a lobbying organisation that represents the news media industry.
We have a massive lobbying team up on The Hill every day, and we’re nothing compared to Google and Big Tech. Nothing.
Now you see why, because Rod was right. They are investing. I mean, what’s the rule again - watch your opponent to learn what they’re afraid of?
And where they are they investing is an unbelievable amount of money in lobbying, both in DC and in the States.
If you look at the numbers, it’s astounding what they’ve spent…
Ricky: I have been waiting to share this chart showing Google’s spending in California in the lead up to that law being killed by Governor Gavin Newsom.
Vertical eh.
Danielle: Yeah, it spiked off the charts. Follow the money. It tells you everything you need to know, then watch their behaviour.
Rod is exactly right. Regulation is exactly what they’re afraid of, which is, changing the rules, not interpreting them and enforcing them.
Although I think that they’re pretty worried about that too.
I think that they were probably fretting before Mehta and now Brinkema was
handing down the remedy.
Ricky: Let’s round this up because we all have so much to do to continue to point the industry north.
I love the fact that we’ve got so much energy, and we’re moving at last. My final question is about your level of optimism?
Where do you think we are in this process? Are we 10 years away? Five, three? Is something going to act as a starting gun? What’s your sense?
Danielle: What we create is something that people want. That’s a great place to be.
It means we are going to continue to be valued by the American people and the global public who are our users. We need to invest in that though for it to continue.
There is a common sense in the world that the use of our content must be fair. There are cases pending against Google. The evidence is there.
There’s also a layman understanding that our quality content can’t continue to be taken as it has been.
And there’s been a demonstration of its value by business deals being done around the market already.
I am optimistic that the market will be righted and then there will be a role for government once the market is functional, and I think we’ll be just fine.
Right now, there’s some waiting. It’s not a 21 year wait like you mentioned at the beginning.
And some publishers don’t have much runway.
Ricky: Here’s my take to close this out.
We don’t have a market problem. We have supply, and plenty of professionals wanting to create news content.
We also have strong demand. People want to consume news content.
What we have is a broken economic model due to monopoly.
There have been many markets through modern history that have suffered from this, and it’s been solved, and they have recovered, continued to grow and thrived.
I remember very clearly that I had a tiny BMX bike when I was 11, and I was paid £1.50-an-hour to deliver newspapers.
I took these newspapers to people’s houses to deliver them, and was paid very little, but it was a way to earn pocket money. It was a value exchange, and I was fine with it.
But I didn’t expect to earn more money than the editor of the newspaper.
Now we’ve got a situation where the paperboy has become a trillionaire and the newspaper is going out of business. Delivery has become the monopoly.
And the market doesn’t need trillionaire paperboys, because there are lots of paperboys willing to earn less money.
But we do need funded creators and editors, or we have nothing of value to deliver. What we have makes no sense.
