Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said there would be no deregulation of the media ownership rules until there was consensus in the media industry.
Speaking at the Future Forum this morning hosted byThe Newspapers Works, Turnbull highlighted that consensus might be hard to come by.
“Now I first represented a media company on a media regulation inquiry in 1977. So I have seen this film before and I know that consensus ends where self-interest kicks in,” Turnbull said.
“I am in the process of holding focused discussions with senior executives in the industry to test if consensus can be achieved on the various proposals that have been put to me.”
While Turnbull highlighted that change is still on the agenda he said it needs to be carefully balanced by two competing concerns.
“The need for diversity in our media industry and to ensure that we have enough economically viable media businesses to make that diversity possible,” he said.
Turnbull also said that while the internet has changed the game and brought a vast array of new challenges, the fact that major publishers have brought in pay walls within the last year shows that when it comes to innovation and embracing new online business models, Australian publishers have been ahead of the curve.
“PWC are forecasting industry-wide digital subscription revenue to grow ten-fold until 2018, with around 6.1 million Australians paying for a digital subscription.”
“Of course each new digital subscriber will bring less revenue per user, but the forecast is that there will be almost double the number of total paying subscribers once digital is taken into account,” he said.
“Clearly pay walls are not a silver bullet.
“Publishers have to find the correct balance between making sure that people pay to read their stuff and at the same time maximise the eyeballs on their sites for the sake of advertisers. This is nothing new - publishers have had the same debate about cover prices since time immemorial.”
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