Scott Purcell, autor en State of Digital Publishing

Independent publisher says the final News Bargaining Incentive design will produce few deals, no diversity, and a distribution formula that hands public-purpose money back to the four conglomerates that cut 450 journalists. Sydney, Australia – 3 August 2026 – Man of Many, one of Australia's largest independent digital publishers, says the final design of the News Bargaining Incentive announced on 2 August improves the scheme in ways worth acknowledging, but leaves untouched the two design features that determine whether any money reaches the broader Australian news industry. What the government got right Man of Many wants to be clear about what has improved, because a good deal of it has. The universal levy closes the loophole that made the original Code unenforceable, where a platform could simply remove news and walk away. Professional networking services have been brought into scope. The offset for deals with small and medium publishers has been lifted substantially, making those deals materially more attractive than deals with incumbents. Platforms must now strike more deals, not fewer, to discharge their liability. The definition of who counts as a journalist has been broadened to include freelancers and other essential news roles, which reflects how independent newsrooms actually operate. On the distribution side, the government has created a grants program for the smallest publishers and start-ups that fall below the $150,000 revenue threshold, and has increased the flows going to regional journalists, to small and medium publishers, and to outlets serving communities that have historically been underserved, including First Nations, culturally and linguistically diverse, LGBTIQA+ and disability communities. That last measure deserves particular credit. Directing more of the pool toward journalists serving communities that mainstream coverage has long neglected is exactly the sort of structural choice a public-purpose scheme should make, and the sector asked for nothing like it. "Anyone claiming the government has not listened is not reading the same document," said Scott Purcell, Co-Founder of Man of Many. "Most of what the independent sector asked for in May is in here, and the support for regional and diverse-community journalism goes beyond what we asked for. We should say so plainly." Why almost none of it will reach the independent sector The difficulty is not the quality of the changes. It is where they operate. Almost every improvement sits on one of two routes, and a publisher has to already be through the gate to benefit from either. Two routes, one gate Every in-scope platform faces a choice between two routes. Route A, commercial deals. The platform negotiates directly with Australian news publishers and pays them for their content. That expenditure earns an offset applied against its charge, so the money leaves the platform and goes to publishers. Route B, the levy. The platform negotiates with nobody, pays the charge to the Commonwealth, and the government distributes that revenue to publishers through the Statutory Payment Scheme. Nothing compels Route A. The arithmetic favours it: because the offset is applied against the charge rather than against taxable income, and is worth 150 per cent of spending with large publishers and 200 per cent with small ones, a platform facing a $100 million charge can extinguish it by spending roughly $50 million on deals with small and medium publishers. Route A costs about half as much as Route B, and the platform gets a content licence rather than a tax receipt. Platforms will still choose Route B, because halving a bill in one mid-sized market is worth less than avoiding the global precedent that news must be paid for and that publishers must be negotiated with one by one. Meta walked away from its Code-era deals in 2024, removed news from Facebook and Instagram in Australia, and has called the Incentive a discriminatory tax. Our understanding is that Google intends to pay the levy rather than do deals. That is not a prediction. It means the Statutory Payment Scheme is not a fallback. It is the scheme. "Both routes are designed in a way that excludes most of the industry, and people keep analysing them as if only one is live," said Purcell. "Route B is the live one. The distribution formula is the whole policy." The eligibility gate governs both routes. Registration is the sole pathway to a distribution. And to claim an offset on a deal with an unregistered publisher, a platform must decide for itself that the content, audience and professional standards tests in section 52G(2)(c) are met, with no regulator sign-off available anywhere. No corporate tax function accepts unquantifiable risk on a claim worth tens of millions, so a platform that goes down Route A will transact only with the largest registered incumbents. "A higher offset on a deal that will never be struck is worth nothing, and a bigger share of a distribution you cannot receive is worth nothing," said Purcell. "The improvements are real. They land on plumbing, not on the gate, and the gate is the problem. The government has turned a scheme that still pays the publishers who were already being paid." 2. Fewer than 100 registered, against the same regulator's count of 2,864 ACMA's register of eligible news businesses lists fewer than 100 news business corporations. ACMA's own separate Media Diversity Measurement Framework, in its 2025 baseline report, identified 2,864 professional news outlets across Australia. The same regulator measures the industry at 2,864 and would fund it at under 100. That framework already contains workable definitions, arrived at through public consultation. It defines news as "any factual reporting by journalists or other information on current events at either a local, regional, national, or international level", and professional news as news produced by an outlet that "adheres to professional standards, is editorially independent, operates predominantly in Australia and produces publicly available news content." "ACMA has already built and operationalised a definition of professional news that captures the actual industry," said Purcell. "It updates every two years as the landscape changes. The government does not need to invent a new gate or defend the old one. It needs to use the one its own regulator already published." 3. "Public significance" is undefined in this Act and defined broadly everywhere else To register, a publisher's primary purpose must be creating "core news content". Section 52A of the Competition and Consumer Act defines content reporting, investigating, or explaining issues relevant to public debate and democratic decision-making, or "current issues or events of public significance". Neither "public significance" nor "public debate" is defined anywhere in the Act, in the Treasury Laws Amendment Act that introduced the Code, or in ACMA's eligibility guidelines. It is defined elsewhere in Australian law. The Broadcasting Services (Regional Commercial Radio — Material of Local Significance) Licence Condition 2014, administered by the same regulator, lists issues or events of public significance as including social issues, health issues, events, persons or organisations in the local area and their views, and cultural interests or issues relating to culture. The Code's own explanatory framing is similarly broad. It says core news content can relate to matters of public policy and government decision making, "as well as other matters of public significance such as reporting on law and order, health, education, environmental issues, science, industrial relations and business". The words "such as" make that list indicative rather than exhaustive. "There is a definition of public significance in Australian broadcasting law, administered by the same regulator, and it covers social issues, health and culture," said Purcell. "Applied to digital publishers, the term has been read down to hard politics. The legislative architecture plainly contemplates a broad reading. The application does not match it." The practical casualty is what the sector calls "social interest journalism": women's health, domestic violence reporting, financial well-being, consumer protection, mental health, sustainability, and consumer rights. All of it goes directly to the health, safety and financial well-being of Australians. Most of it sits outside the political framing the test has been read against. 4. Same publisher, same articles, opposite decisions Man of Many was assessed by ACMA as meeting the content test when it was registered, and assessed as failing it when it was revoked on 13 January 2026 under section 52H(2)(a), with the corporation revoked under section 52H(5). The reasoning for revocation relied on the same categories of articles present at the original registration: consumer products, automotive, sport, and lifestyle. The editorial position had not changed. The interpretation had. Broadsheet Media and Urban List were revoked on the same day on the same grounds. All three are Mumbrella Publish Award-winning independents. Mamamia spent a long period in stalemate with ACMA before The Quicky and its news section were finally registered in May 2026. "This is the part that should trouble anyone drafting the bill," said Purcell. "Nothing we published changed. The regulator's reading of an undefined word changed. If eligibility can move underneath a publisher without the publisher doing anything, it is not a standard. It is a judgment call, and a business cannot plan around it. 5. "The bill pays for content that the distribution scheme refuses to recognise The legislation applies two different standards to the same journalism. To earn an offset, a platform's money must be spent on "covered news content", which the Administration Bill defines as core news content plus content that "reports, investigates or explains current issues or events of interest to Australians." To qualify as a publisher under the distribution scheme, a business must meet the narrower "core news content" test in section 52N. "The bill will pay a platform two dollars of offset for every dollar it spends licensing content, the same bill says is not news," said Purcell. "As drafted, the content is worth paying for under the offset, yet the publisher is not worth funding when the money is distributed. Either this work has value, or it does not. Pick one." Aligning the two standards was the only change the independent sector requested in both of its submissions. It was not adopted. 6. The registration process is a tax on the publishers least able to pay it Registration requires proof of six separate tests, with documentary evidence for every nominated news source. Man of Many spent roughly 18 months on that process and received neither a deal nor a dollar under the original Code. Google met with Man of Many and said it was "not core news" despite the company being registered at the time. The Statutory Payment Scheme then layers on annual submission of full time equivalent journalist numbers, payroll evidence, evidence of the nature of each role or a statutory declaration, reports before and after each payment period, notification of any change affecting eligibility, notification of structural changes to the corporate group or editorial units, reporting of local government areas covered, and a standing condition to maintain the funded headcount. The consultation paper contemplates auditing employment records, backed by investigatory powers, pecuniary penalties and exclusion from the scheme. A listed conglomerate absorbs that with an existing compliance function. A small newsroom absorbs it by taking someone off the tools. "The publishers this scheme is for are the ones who will spend a fortnight of somebody's year proving they exist, and the government will spend its own money assessing them," said Purcell. "It is a waste on both sides of the desk, and the cost of it would have funded more journalism if it had simply been paid to publishers directly." 7. The AI exemption did not close. It widened. Clause 9(c) of the Administration Bill defines a search service as one that "neither solely nor primarily uses large language models". ChatGPT, Perplexity, Anthropic's Claude and every AI-only successor therefore sit outside the regime entirely, however much Australian journalism they consume. The final design leaves this untouched and narrows the charge base from total Australian revenue to digital advertising revenue, the one revenue line AI assistants largely do not have. "Publishers are seeing referral traffic fall by twenty to sixty per cent because of AI summarisation. That is the mechanism dismantling the model right now," said Purcell. "The test should be conducted, not the corporate structure. If you generate revenue from Australian users above the threshold and you use Australian publisher content to serve them, you are in scope." 8. We know what happens next, because it already happened An estimated $200 to $250 million a year flowed under the original Code, with roughly sixty to seventy per cent going to News Corp Australia, Nine Entertainment and Seven West Media. In the same period, News Corp's parent launched a US$1 billion share buyback. Nine acquired QMS Media for $850 million and cut 200 jobs, ninety of them in Publishing, across the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the Australian Financial Review, Brisbane Times and WAtoday. Seven West Media announced a $100 million cost-out program with 100 to 150 redundancies. Approximately 450 journalists were made redundant across the three commercial recipients in 2024 alone. Over the same five years, the Public Interest Journalism Initiative recorded 183 newsroom closures and 175 contractions, seventy per cent of the damage in regional Australia. No obligation existed then, and none exists in the current draft, requiring a recipient to disclose how the money was spent. Treasury's own statutory review flagged that gap in December 2022. Under a distribution formula based on full-time-equivalent journalists, applied to a register of fewer than a hundred businesses, the same four organisations would absorb the substantial majority of any pool. "We are not arguing about whether platforms should pay. That argument is over, and the government won it," said Purcell. "We are arguing about whether the money funds journalism or funds balance sheets, and there are five years of evidence on that question." What Man of Many is asking for Man of Many acknowledges the genuine improvements in the final design: the universal levy that closes the withdrawal loophole, the increase in the small and medium publisher offset, the broadening of the definition of journalist to include freelancers, and anti-avoidance provisions modelled on Part IVA of the Income Tax Assessment Act. Before the bill is introduced, Man of Many asks for four amendments: Adopt ACMA's own Media Diversity Measurement Framework definitions as the eligibility basis. They are already operationalised, already consulted on, already updated biennially, and they capture the actual industry. Align the two content standards. A publisher producing content that the bill offsets should be able to qualify for distribution. Make the search service definition technology-neutral by removing the exclusion of large language models in clause 9(c). Mandate the use of funds reporting, verified by payroll evidence on the JobKeeper model, so every dollar can be traced to a working journalist's salary. "The bill has not been introduced. None of these weakens the scheme," said Purcell. "They make it reach the industry it is meant to protect."

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