Choppy surf for subsidies
On an overcast late morning at the Kurrawa Surf Club on the Gold Coast, a group of global media scholars converged at the News Industries: Funding Innovations and Futures ICA post-conference to tackle a thorny subject: how governments can provide funds and relief for private media’s mounting concerns. Panellists discussed subsidies both for their provisions and their drawbacks, as well as the criticisms they have invited. While numerous scholars have surveyed these kinds of approaches, there is clear value to having the scholars most familiar with the schemes reflect on their context and their results, and their detailed insights provided a number of interesting takeaways.
One thing that stood out is the diversity of what the subsidies cover, and no two countries reported the same targets or interventions. Where Australia’s focused on regional issues, South Korea’s included components like discount loans for journalists and extensive ad buys to help journalists and their employers keep the lights on. Canada’s labour tax credit was a focus of their schemes but Norway has long provided a large amount of direct support for operation and production costs. They all reported challenges facing their media systems, but Eli Skogerbø, Alfred Hermida, Jaemin Jung and your writer, on behalf of the CMT described a variety of potential solutions.
Conversely, the scholars described a range of criticisms of how the subsidies are rolled out and their impacts. Some, like Canada’s tax deduction for news subscription, garnered little interest or take up due to its size and the mismatch between consumers’ choices and the subsidy’s scope. Others, like Australia’s regional support and Korea’s support for newspapers, fell short of ameliorating the growing crises facing parts of the media that are still important to their subscribers and communities. In many cases – including in responses from the scholars in the audience – political challenges were raised as a difficult intervening factor, with governments arguing to end the support or to shape it toward their own ends. Whatever the benefits of subsidies, the headwinds they face and the ways they are shaped proved an impediment for their impact.
Overall, the picture that emerged of these subsidies was both diverse and complex. According to panellists, narrow scopes and limited funding precluded strong effects, but unstructured and larger subsidies mostly benefited the status quo, and politics often played a role. Ultimately, the challenge remains – how to fund journalism.
Tim Koskie, CMT researcher
