The three-year partnership was announced Monday. It will allow content from a large part of Rupert Murdoch’s local media empire, including the Australian newspaper, which appears on Facebook News – a section of the platform that compiles coverage of selected publishers. The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.
The deal contributes to a stream of new partnerships that News Corp has signed in Australia over the past few weeks.
Sky News Australia, a broadcaster owned by a local News Corp subsidiary, has entered into a separate agreement Facebook (FB), which “builds on an existing arrangement,” News Corp. (NWS) said in a statement on Monday.
Last month, the conglomerate – which includes a large part of the Australian media and some British sections, as well as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in the United States – also reached an agreement with Google (GOOGL).
The partnership can display News Corp’s US, UK and Australian publications on Google’s News Showcase platform. It is also expected to include the development of a subscriber platform, the sharing of advertising revenue and the investment in audio and video journalism.
Google did not want to share the terms of the agreement, but News Corp claimed that it would receive “significant payments”.
News Corp. is already working with Facebook in the United States, where its publications are paid to appear on the social network.
But the company insisted on new rules in Australia, where the debate was fierce over a media code forcing Big Tech to pay publishers for news shared on their platforms.
The debate came to a head last month, a few days before the law was passed. That was when Facebook decided to ban news content in Australia in anticipation of the law, which forced the pages of media organizations and even some unrelated essential services to go dark. It eventually restored news content there after the government agreed to make some changes to the legislation.
Prior to that, Google also threatened to pull its search engine into the country. It later cost another punch by pushing partnerships with some of the country’s largest media organizations, including News Corp, to advance the law.
News Corp. was one of the strongest proponents of the law. The company was forced to cut jobs last year and shut down dozens of newspapers in Australia, saying the blow from the coronavirus pandemic was too great to resist.
News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson alluded to the firm’s long-running battle in a statement on Monday, saying “Rupert and [co-chairman] Lachlan Murdoch led a global debate while others in our industry lay silent or on their backs. ‘
“This digital unraveling has been going on for over a decade,” he added. “The agreement with Facebook is a milestone in transforming the trading conditions for journalism, and will have a significant and significant impact on our Australian news businesses.”
– Kerry Flynn contributed to this report.
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