Australia’s largest newspaper publisher, News Corp, yesterday announced that most of its suburban and regional mastheads nationwide would next month become digital-only due to the COVID-19 pandemic and digital platforms sharing their content.
News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller described the shift that is to take effect on June 29 as significant and said that jobs would be lost, but did not say how many.
“COVID-19 has impacted the sustainability of community and regional publishing. Despite the audiences of News Corp’s digital mastheads growing more than 60 percent as Australians turned to trusted media sources during the peak of the recent COVID-19 lockdowns, print advertising spending, which contributes the majority of our revenues, has accelerated its decline,” Miller said in a statement.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Many News Corp print mastheads were challenged, and the double effects of the coronavirus lockdown plus tech platforms such as Google and Facebook Inc not remunerating local publishers for content made the mastheads unsustainable, Miller said.
“These initiatives are significant. They will involve fundamental changes to how we operate our business, but they are necessary,” Miller said.
Some mastheads, or newspaper titles, would disappear, but their news would be published in regional sections of other mastheads, he said.
Paul Murphy, chief executive of Australia’s journalists union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, said he understood that 150 editorial jobs would be lost.
“We’ve already seen over 100 titles around the country close in regional areas and in local news coverage,” Murphy said.
“It really underlines the scale of the crisis confronting regional and local journalism in this country, which has been brought to a head by this pandemic,” he added.
News Corp early last month suspended printing operations for 60 local papers in Australia as advertising revenue vanished due to the pandemic.
The government has announced that Google and Facebook would be forced to pay for news content in Australia.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is in July to release draft rules for the platforms to pay fair compensation for content siphoned from news media.
News Corp publishes the best-selling newspapers in most of Australia’s largest cities.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday obtained the government’s approval to inject an additional US$7.5 billion into its US subsidiary, the Department of Investment Review said in a statement. The department approved TSMC’s application of investing in TSMC Arizona Corp, which is engaged in the manufacturing, sales, testing and design of IC and other semiconductor devices, it said. The latest capital injection follows a US$5 billion investment for TSMC Arizona approved in June. The chipmaker has broken ground on two advanced fabs in Arizona with aggregated investments approved by the department totaling US$24 billion thus far. According to TSMC, the first Arizona
The lethal hack of Hezbollah’s Asian-branded pagers and walkie-talkies has sparked an intense search for the devices’ path, revealing a murky market for older technologies where buyers might have few assurances about what they are getting. While supply chains and distribution channels for higher-margin and newer products are tightly managed, that is not the case for older electronics from Asia where counterfeiting, surplus inventories and complex contract manufacturing deals can sometimes make it impossible to identify the source of a product, analysts and consultants say. The response from the companies at the center of the booby-trapped gadgets that killed 37
FRIENDLY TAKEOVER: While Qualcomm Inc’s proposal to buy some or all of Intel raises the prospect of other competitors, Broadcom Inc is staying on the sidelines Qualcomm Inc has approached Intel Corp to discuss a potential acquisition of the struggling chipmaker, people with knowledge of the matter said, raising the prospect of one of the biggest-ever merger and acquisition deals. California-based Qualcomm proposed a friendly takeover for Intel in recent days, said the sources, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information. The proposal is for all of the chipmaker, although Qualcomm has not ruled out buying some parts of Intel and selling off others. It is uncertain whether the initial approach would lead to an agreement and any deal is likely to come under close antitrust scrutiny
SECURITY CONCERNS: The proposed ban on Chinese autonomous vehicle software and hardware would go into effect with the 2027 and 2030 model years respectively The US Department of Commerce today is expected to propose prohibiting Chinese software and hardware in connected and autonomous vehicles on US roads due to national security concerns, two sources said. US President Joe Biden’s administration has raised concerns about the collection of data by Chinese companies on US drivers and infrastructure as well as the potential foreign manipulation of vehicles connected to the Internet and navigation systems. The proposed regulation would ban the import and sale of vehicles from China with key communications or automated driving system software or hardware, said the two sources, who declined to be identified because the