‘Google and Facebook have acted with a fair amount of integrity’: Private Media’s Will Hayward
Deals with Google and Facebook have been hard to come by for some independent publishers, as the complexities of the Bargaining Code continue to roll on.
Speaking on this week’s Mumbrellacast, CEO of Private Media, Will Hayward said while some publishers have found it more difficult than others, “I actually seem to disagree with most people and think that Google and Facebook have acted with a fair amount of integrity on the issue”.
Hayward, CEO of Private Media, which has deals with both platforms
Private Media, the publisher of Crikey, Smart Company and The Mandarin has deals with both Google and Meta (Facebook).
Hayward said all of the meetings with both platforms “have been incredibly constructive”.
“And I’m not just saying that because we have deals with both of them. I think they have tried to support journalism.”
While publishers like Private Media and Schwartz Media have agreed to deals, others have not been able to, with a group of independent publishers recently launching the #WaitingOnZuck campaign against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Hayward said he understands the position they are in and highlights the complex situation the industry is currently in.
“I think the Government has forced Google and Meta’s hands to do something that has had a big distorting impact on the media sector in Australia, and I have a huge amount of sympathy for the likes of Broadsheet who have a fantastic product and a very good business that now operates in an extremely distorted market where some of their competitors are benefiting from significant capital investments as a result of the Bargaining Code.”
He does add that in some instances there is a differentiator in the type of journalism that is on the receiving end of the funds handed out, yet still there continues to be difficulties in the way the funds are handed out.
“I would also add that what Private Media does is extremely hard and very risky. We put journalists on stories over a long period of time, and as I said already, sometimes they don’t pay off and that is a financial gamble.”
INQ, launched in 2019, now folded into Crikey’s editorial team
“We had made our company profitable pre-Bargaining Code, and it does have this big sort of distorting impact when you worked so hard to turn your business into a sustainable thing, you then have this massive influx of capital, all of your competitors have significantly more, so I don’t think it’s great.”
On those financial gambles, earlier in the podcast, Hayward spoke about Private Media’s investment in INQ, its investigative journalism department which was launched three years ago.
Now, the INQ “experiment” has been folded into the wider Crikey team.
Back when it was launched, Hayward said the thesis was that “it was a big bet on investigative reporting”.
“If you were to sort of condense the strategy at the time, which was before my time, it would have been a sizable investment in investigative journalism will pay off within a short timeframe, and we have subsequently discovered that’s not true.
“Investigative journalism is very, very hard. I compare it to venture capital, like if you throw a huge ton of resources at a bunch of things and almost none of them pay off and periodically you build a Facebook and it totally explodes.”
Crikey continues to invest in investigative journalism Hayward said. “I already mentioned David Hardaker’s work on Hillsong, the work Amber (Schultz) is doing Romania right now, all the things that are kind of front of mind right now.
But INQ as a kind of a separate entity with a separate P and L, and a separate brand, and a separate team, that was a gamble that didn’t work.”
“Though I would say. if the size of our total editorial investment in Crikey is not already larger than it was during the heights of INQ, it’s certainly will be within three to six months.”
Look out for the full conversation on tomorrow’s Mumbrellacast. You can find all previous episodes here.
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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