Wednesday 17th February: Excluded French publishers infuriated by Google deal

February 17, 2021

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

Google has agreed to pay $76 million over three years to a group of 121 French news publishers to end a more than year-long copyright spat. The licensing fee will cover stories appearing in Google's new News Showcase product. Similar agreements have been made recently with publishers in a number of other countries as the search giant seeks to ease legislative pressures.

We've discussed before on the podcast that the issue with these licensing agreements is that they divide publishers into those that are influential enough to negotiate payments, and those that get left with nothing. This is now exactly what has happened in France.

Google's agreement is with the Alliance de la presse d’information generale (APIG), a lobby group representing a number of major French publishers. But other French news providers that do not belong to the group are not part of the agreement. These publishers are justifiably pretty annoyed, and are pressing forward with actions against Google.

Worth noting too in this piece are the disparities highlighted between how much various news outlets are being paid.

Talking of financing news, the New Zealand government has pledged $55 million for a new fund for public interest news and journalism - the biggest single boost in media funding for many years. The new fund will support “public interest journalism which would otherwise be at risk . . . to be produced and shared through New Zealand media outlets”.

...and talking of Google, WNIP brings you the details of their upcoming search algorithm update, with new page experience signals and Core Web Vitals. The tech giant has also released a variety of tools to help publishers get ready for the changes.

This isn't the first publisher collaboration around ads, and as first-party data becomes all the more important, it likely won't be the last. Gannett's USA Today national sales team will lead the strategy on behalf of both companies, reaching an estimated 200 million adults consuming local news across the country.

This week's podcast:

This week Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, tells us where newspapers are going wrong in their subscription marketing, why there’s no easy solution to the need for internal change in newsrooms, and why Nordic countries outperform when it comes to the membership mentality.

Have you seen our shortlist? Despite a challenging year, over 100 podcasts made the shortlist of the 2021 Publisher Podcast Awards, underlining publisher commitment to podcasting. Check our shortlist here - and read why we're trialling a Pay What You Want ticketing system here.