News Production

Facebook is teaming up with News Corp Australia with a three-year partnership that was announced on Monday. It will allow content from much of Rupert Murdoch's local media empire to be featured on Facebook. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The agreement adds to a stream of new partnerships News Corp has signed in Australia in recent weeks.

In a statement Monday, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson alluded to the firm's longtime battle, arguing that "Rupert and [co-chairman] Lachlan Murdoch led a global debate while others in our industry were silent or supine."

Google has launched Google News Showcase in the UK and Argentina, offering selected paywall content to users for free. News Showcase is already available in Germany, Brazil and, as of last week, Australia. Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, said the program would help the company pay $1 billion to publishers over the next three years.

Google has threatened to remove its search engine from Australia and Facebook has threatened to remove news from its feed for all Australian users if a code forcing the companies to negotiate payments to news media companies goes ahead.

The move would mean the 19 million Australians Google users would no longer be able to use Google Search.

At a Senate hearing in Canberra on Friday, Google Australia Managing Director Mel Silva said the draft legislation "remains unworkable," and would be "breaking" the way millions of users searched for content online.

Latvian National Electronic Mass Media Council announced it has banned the state-controlled Russian television channel RT. The ban will be valid for as long as Dmitry Kiselyov, network executive, remains on the list of sanctioned persons of the European Union’s.

The Council banned seven distinct channels belonging to the multilingual network operated by RT from being broadcast in the country, accusing RT of attempting to present Latvia as a failed state.

About 30 per cent of the country's population speaks Russian as a first language, with most of them being ethnic Russians.

The New York Times has ended its partnership with Apple News and has stopped distributing articles in the Apple News App.

The biggest factors behind the decision are that "Apple had given it little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business," and The Times is seeking to "drive readers directly to its own website and mobile app so that it could 'fund quality journalism'."

"Core to a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers and the nature of our business rules," so Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer. "Our relationship with Apple News does not fit within these parameters."

Google announced on Thursday that it would begin paying publishers to license “high-quality” content in a licensing deal that initially has media groups in Australia, Brazil and Germany signed up.

The first publishers that will be licensing their content are Australian groups Schwartz Media, The Conversation and Solstice Media, Brazil’s Diarios Associados, and Germany’s Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit and Rheinische Post.

Google will also offer to pay for free access for users to read paywalled articles on a publisher’s site. The goal is to let paywalled publishers grow their audiences and open an opportunity for people to read the content they might not ordinarily see.

Microsoft won’t renew the contracts of around 50 contract news producers working at MSN and plans to use artificial intelligence to replace them. On Wednesday the tech giant notified affected employees that their services would no longer be needed beyond June 30.

The company said in a statement: "Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic."