Media bosses warned MPs this week journalism is in jeopardy here if they don't back a Bill making offshore tech giants pay for news carried on Facebook and Google. It's based on laws already in place in Australia and Canada. Mediawatch asks the ex-editor leading the publishers' pitch how it might work.

Media bosses warned MPs this week journalism is in jeopardy here if they don't back a Bill making offshore tech giants pay for news carried on Facebook and Google. It's based on laws already in place in Australia and Canada. Mediawatch asks the ex-editor leading the publishers' pitch how it might work.

It's not uncommon to find anguished articles in the media about the perilous state of the news media business these days - both here and overseas.

The New Yorker published a grim essay last weekend under the headline Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?

Author Claire Malone said the expert predicting 'extinction' had cited the prospect of Google rolling out A.I.-integrated search tools.

If Google's A.I. interface answers routine search queries itself rather than referring users to the online sources of news and information it could be devastating for media websites, he said.

"We are witnessing nothing less than the end of the mass-media era," media analyst Brian Morrissey said.

"Clinging to scraps of hope" was how New Yorker writer Claire Moloney summed up the prospects for news media companies.

The owner of the biggest publisher of news in New Zealand echoed that in Parliament on Thursday before a committee considering the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill.

Stuff owner Sinead Boucher said the advent of generative AI looked "increasingly like an extinction-level event" for news publications. Journalism here "is in a fight for its life" and "clinging on by its fingertips . . . against some of history's biggest companies," she said.

The FNDB Bill is a tool to pressure Google and Facebook owner Meta to pay NZ news media companies for the local news and content they carry on their lucrative online platforms.

Their success in the past twenty years has come at the cost of local media. They have lost the lion's share of their ad revenue to Google and Facebook while at the same time becoming more dependent on them to reach an audience online.

Australia's government reacted with legislation to force the tech titans to do deals with news publishers if they didn't hammer out their own deals by themselves.

The process was fraught, but a bargaining code is now putting millions of dollars back into Australian news publishers. …

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