The three-year collaboration was announced on Monday.It will enable content from much of Rupert Murdoch’s local media empire,including the Australian newspaper, which will appear on Facebook News – part of the platform that manages the coverage of selected publishers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The deal adds to a stream of new partnerships that News Corp has signed in Australia in recent weeks.
Sky News Australia, a broadcaster owned by a local subsidiary of News Corp, has entered into a separate agreement FacebookFB, which ‘builds on an existing scheme’, News CorpNWS said in a statement Monday.
Last month, the conglomerate – which includes much of the Australian media and some UK outlets, as well as the Wall Street Journal and New York Post in the United States – also revealed an agreement with GoogleGOOGL
The partnership will allow News Corp’s US, UK and Australian publications to be featured on Google’s News Showcase platform. But it is also expected to include developing a subscription platform, sharing ad revenue, and investing in audio and video journalism.
Google declined to share the terms of that deal, but News Corp has claimed it would receive “significant payments.”
News Corp is already partnering with Facebook in the United States, where its publications are paid to be featured on the social network.
But the company had pushed for new rules in Australia, where the debate had been 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, just days before the bill was passed. It was then that Facebook decided, in anticipation of the law, to ban news content in Australia, obscuring the pages of media organizations and even some unrelated essential services. It eventually restored the news content there after the government agreed to make some changes to the legislation.
Previously, Google had also threatened to withdraw its search engine from the country. It later took a different tack by partnering with some of the country’s largest media organizations, including News Corp., to stay ahead of the law.
News Corp. was one of the fiercest supporters of the law. The company was forced to cut jobs and shut down dozens of newspapers in Australia last year because it was too big to withstand the blow of the coronavirus pandemic.
In a statement on Monday, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson alluded to the company’s protracted struggle, arguing that “Rupert and [co-chairman] Lachlan Murdoch led a global debate, while others in our industry were taciturn or leaned. “
“This digital denouement is more than a decade in the making,” he added. “The agreement with Facebook is a milestone in the transformation of journalism trading conditions, and will have a material and meaningful impact on our Australian news businesses.”
