Five years ago Dr Merja Myllylahti warned our news media were becoming dangerously dependent on global digital platforms which gave them online audiences but undercut their income and didn't seem to care much about news. What's the story five years on?

Five years ago Dr Merja Myllylahti warned our news media were becoming dangerously dependent on global digital platforms which gave them online audiences, but undercut their income and didn't seem to care much about news. What's the story five years on?

Winston Peters made plenty of headlines with his claim the former government bribed the media with the $55m Public Interest Journalism Fund.

The outgoing government had already backed away from the Fund before the election. Labour confirmed it wouldn't repeat or renew it if the party won.

The long, loud backlash from those who reckoned that the fund did skew news coverage - even though it didn't - was one reason.

But Labour's media spokesperson Willie Jackson also told a pre-election meeting the media wouldn't need that kind of a cash injection if another of his government's interventions worked out.

The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill prods online operators like Google and Facebook to cut financial deals with local media for the news that they've distributed for years for no cost.

"A huge amount of good journalists have all gone out the door... because these big companies come in, take everything and don't give anything back. If we get this bill through, we'll get a couple of hundred million bucks coming back into the market," Jackson told the Better Public Media pre-election debate.

Two hundred million dollars a year is a very optimistic - even heroic - estimate of the revenue such bargaining might achieve. It's roughly the sum the deals struck with Google and Meta (owner of Facebook) in Australia are estimated to have netted in the first year after Australia's government forced the issue.

But while it did bring big money into the media there, it's been a different story so far in Canada.

Canada's Online News Act, also called Bill C-18, prompted Google to threaten to remove Canadian news from their search services last year and Meta briefly did so for Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Last week Google agreed to pay a single Canadian collective which would then distribute the funds to the eligible news media agencies. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details