TRANSCRIPT
"Don't torch journalism, pay your journalists, don't torch journalism, pay your journalists..."
Workers at Nine Network take to the streets of Sydney and Melbourne to begin their protest.
It follows a failed negotiation with the heads of the network for a pay increase that would keep up with the rise of cost-of-living prices.
Rachael Dexter is a journalist for The Age in Melbourne and a union delegate with the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.
"The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the (Australian) Financial Review, WA Today and Brisbane Times have been negotiating with Nine's publishing division bosses for a number of months since the beginning of the year on new enterprise bargaining agreements. For many months we have been fighting for a fair wage increase. Like many people in other industries, we have been going backwards in real terms with the inflated cost of living. In recent weeks, negotiations were paused by management."
The strike comes after a series of layoffs from the Nine Entertainment Group and closures in a multitude of publications they owned.
At least 200 people were made redundant from the group, ending its agreements with several youth-oriented online publications such as Kotaku, Vice, Gizmodo, Refinery29 and Lifehacker.
People who continue to work for the network, such as Ms Dexter, claim it is inexcusable for their pay rise request to be turned down as Nine continues to remain profitable in difficult conditions.
"We are appalled at the call to pull jobs out of the publishing division at Nine. The publishing division of Nine is a profitable entity. That is on the record. Mike Sneesby, who is the CEO of Nine, has spoken to investors in recent times on how profitable the publishing divisions are. We're a subscription-based business. We're doing well. Our profit margins are healthier than that of The New York Times."
Nine also announced the re-structuring of Pedestrian, resulting in further job losses.
Courtney Smith is a former journalist for Kotaku and Pedestrian who was affected by the layoffs.
"I was definitely feeling disappointed already with my pay. And we had been told that no-one would be getting a pay rise, maybe around May-June. And I was pretty miffed (annoyed) at that so I was already looking at different work outside of journalism because I thought I won't be able to get good pay in media."
Yet workers at Nine are not the only ones being affected by the changing media landscape in Australia.
On Thursday, a group of long-time journalists from News Corp's reporting team were also made redundant as part of the company's attempt to save costs.
Health reporter Sue Dunleavy, foreign correspondent Charles Miranda, national investigations editor Ben Butler and investigative reporter Natalie O'Brien were among those who lost their jobs.
Workers at Network Ten, the Seven West Group and other media organisations in Australia have also been hit by layoffs this year.
Amanda Lotz, a media professor at the University of Technology in Queensland, says the situation has been brewing for a while now.
"Yeah well, it's happening everywhere. It's an adjustment that is very much tied to the amount of advertising spending that has left, well now it's happening mostly in the television space, but it's the same process that's been happening for over a decade that ten years ago was really hitting newspapers significantly. So advertisers, instead of spending money on newspapers and television, are increasingly spending it on Search, on social media and the space is sort of like putting an ad on Amazon, on the web page, when you're searching for a product."
But it's not just a cut in advertising revenue that news managers have been forced to deal with.
The struggle between Australia's media organisations and social media outlets has been long and costly.
In its latest move, Facebook parent company Meta decided it would not be renewing its agreements under the News Media Bargaining Code, creating even more problems for news outlets.
The Bargaining Code was enacted by federal government in 2021 to ensure media companies can make a share of profit from stories that were re-published on social media platforms.
Professor Lotz says the Code was set to fail from the start as it didn't have a firm basis.
"They have been propped up by money that, frankly, was arbitrarily awarded by that Bargaining Code. If you look back on what media scholars were saying when that was announced, they said it was a bad policy. We knew this moment would come. It may be only surprising that it has happened this quickly. But that wasn't a good solution to the problem. If you want to shore up your journalistic organisations, you have to give them a sustainable business model. A sustainable business model was never expecting social media to arbitrarily provide some level of funding for these organisations."
The ongoing situation in Australia's media industry parallels what's been taking place across the Tasman.
In New Zealand, the number of employed journalists decreased by almost 50 per cent between 2006 to 2018, while several publications either downsized or shut down.
Just in the last 2 years, at least 550 people across the industry have lost their jobs as media organisations incurred losses worth tens of millions of dollars.
Rachael Dexter of the MEAA says a healthy democracy depends on journalists bringing the news to the public.
"I think in order to keep great journalists in this industry making great journalism for this country, serving this democracy, we need to be paying people a reasonable wage. Journalists need to pay bills, pay their mortgages, feed their families, just like everybody else."
But in the current environment of uncertainty, the idea of a career in the field of journalism, and more specifically niche journalism, is beginning to look like an unachievable dream.
People like Courtney Smith say they're starting to turn their attention elsewhere, as writing becomes more of an afterthought.
"I think if the journalism you want to do is hard-hitting news, I think there's room, because there'll always be a need for the news. But if, like me, you want to do features and cultural news, I think there isn't much room to grow and thrive in that space. I'm looking for work in marketing and PR and Communications because I don't think there's a future for that kind of journalism."
Among other issues, artificial intelligence, or AI, has also become a factor in the field of modern journalism.
As automated machines become increasingly capable of instantly assembling stories that would take humans several minutes to compile, their appeal for potential investors grows.
But that puts into question the reliability of those stories, as AI still lacks the capability of independent thought and is incapable of investigating.
Journalists want media corporations to take preventative measures against the rise of AI, to ensure they can maintain the trust of their audiences.
Professor Lotz says there's still time to get the balance right.
"If we can learn anything about the broader digital change that we have experienced now for 20 years, (it's that) these things tend to happen slowly. And so, I think, if you're entering fields right now, you do want to be aware of the ways in which, what parts of the job don't need to be done by a human and making sure that you're heading toward one that humans continue to be a very important part of the process. And we've already seen a lot of... the way in which the AI is not effectively fulfilling some of those journalist roles."
Although the current situation looks bleak, journalists across the country continue to hope for improvement and stability.
But for now, it seems as though things could get worse before they get better.
