The agreement involves News Corp Australia and includes The Australian national newspaper, the news.com.au news site, major metropolitan mastheads like The Daily Telegraph in New South Wales, Herald Sun in Victoria and The Courier-Mail in Queensland and regional and community publications.
In parallel, Sky News Australia has also reached a new agreement with Facebook which extends and significantly builds on an existing arrangement.
The three-year deal follows an agreement reached in October, 2019 in which News Corp publications in the United States receive payments in exchange for access to additional stories for Facebook News.
News Corp now has agreements with Facebook, Google and Apple to provide access to journalism and related content for a potential audience of millions around the world.
News Corp and its leadership, including Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Co-Chairman Lachlan Murdoch and Chief Executive Robert Thomson, have championed the cause of the tech platforms compensating news publications for content for many years, says the company.
“The agreement with Facebook is a landmark in transforming the terms of trade for journalism, and will have a material and meaningful impact on our Australian news businesses. Mark Zuckerberg and his team deserve credit for their role in helping to fashion a future for journalism, which has been under extreme duress for more than a decade,” said Mr. Thomson, News Corp Chief Executive. “Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch led a global debate while others in our industry were silent or supine as digital dysfunctionality threatened to turn journalism into a mendicant order. We are grateful to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Chair Rod Sims and his team for taking a principled stand for publishers, small and large, rural and urban, and for Australia. This digital denouement has been more than a decade in the making.”
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