Around 30 independent media publishers in Australia are taking part in #WaitingOnZuck on Tuesday, a 24-hour campaign in which they will not publish news to create pressure on Facebook to pay for content that appears on its platform and on Meta to pay for journalism.
The publishers are not putting out any news today as they are #WaitingOnZuck.
The small and medium publishers taking part in the campaign include Broadsheet, Concrete Playground, Urban List, City Hub, Star Observer, Australian Jewish News and Australian Chinese Daily, Womens Agenda, Independent Australia.net, Brunswick Voice, and many more.
As explained by Independentaustrailia.net, The News Media Bargaining Code, introduced by the Australian Government (courtesy of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg) in March 2021, was supposed to address this obscene power imbalance. But instead of bridging the increasing revenue gap between the giant publishers and the small-medium publishers, Meta and Google failed them by making deals with the big publishers exacerbating the massive competitive disadvantage, badly impacting the “little guys” of the industry.
Apart from Meta and Google, other companies like Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit and other search engines or social media are not covered by the Code. This gives these two companies more control over the revenue inflow of the publishers
After trying for at least one year to sit and talk with Mark Zuckerberg, the publishers have initiated a website - https://www.waitingonzuck.com/ urging people to send emails, DMs, tweets, to Zuckerberg asking him to look into this matter.
The campaign also urges Australians to Frydenberg to complain about the erosion of the Australian news media landscape without greater accountability for Facebook to negotiate with independent publishers.
In a column today, Angela Presly, Cofounder at Women’s Agenda, an independent media publisher, said, “We are inviting Facebook to the negotiating table, as they were asked to do 12 months ago when the Australian Federal Government passed the News Media Bargaining Code into law. The purpose was to support public interest journalism, but if publications like ours are left out due to Facebook refusing to fairly play ball, then it has the opposite effect. Facebook’s current stance is making it impossible to compete, with millions of dollars being paid to larger publishing platforms who can go on to spend on audience acquisition, better marketing and tech. So no news today. We are #WaitingOnZuck.”
Publishers and the media fraternity took to Twitter to show their support for the cause. Some noteworthy tweets in support of the campaign are:
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