WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT
A week before I started writing this editorial, news services on Facebook were switched off. The decision, a response to the Federal Government’s laws forcing tech giants to pay publishers for news content, seemed a pretty heavy handed one – after all, many publishers weren’t even involved in the negotiations around the proposed Media Bargaining Code, while others had spent years building up a following on Facebook, often at considerable expense, to promote their work through the platform. It wasn’t just something that affected big players such as the ABC or Nine Network, either, but small publishers and local community newspapers as well. Bizarrely, members of the photographic community you might not immediately class as “news” were swept up in the ban, with the hundreds of thousands of followers on the…
