UPDATE: Country Press Australia (CPA) has issued an urgent call to action following the Albanese Government’s recent decision to reject a copyright exemption for AI companies. CPA President Damian Morgan warns that immediate measures are needed to protect regional journalism from exploitation by artificial intelligence platforms.
Morgan highlighted that the damage to regional journalism is not a distant concern—it is happening right now. “AI companies think they are above the law,” he stated. “They are harvesting local news stories, paraphrasing them, and delivering them back to users as answers rather than links.” This practice undermines local publishers, depriving them of subscribers and advertising revenue.
The CPA’s president emphasized that while the public continues to consume quality journalism, it does not benefit the original publishers. “The reporting is ours, but the commercial benefit is captured by offshore technology companies,” Morgan added.
Regional publishers have implemented metered or hybrid paywalls to sustain their operations, yet AI scraping routinely bypasses these protections, further jeopardizing the financial foundation necessary to retain local journalists. “These platforms are now replacing the publisher in real time,” Morgan warned. “They extract our reporting, convert it into their own output, and keep the audience.”
Morgan’s concerns extend to the potential repeat of a policy failure reminiscent of when Meta withdrew funding for news in Australia. “We cannot go through a second cycle where big tech uses regional reporting to drive engagement but refuses to fund the journalism that makes it possible,” he stated.
Country Press Australia is advocating for a national licensing framework that ensures AI companies are required to pay for using Australian news. This framework must explicitly include regional publishers alongside larger media organizations. Furthermore, Morgan insists that a low-cost, expedited enforcement process is essential for smaller publishers who cannot afford lengthy legal battles.
“Regional journalism is not simply a commercial product. It is public infrastructure in democratic life,” Morgan asserted. He warned that if AI scraping continues unchecked, local reporting will vanish, not due to a lack of community value, but because AI has siphoned away the audience and revenue needed to sustain it. “Once a regional newsroom closes, there is no replacing it,” he emphasized.
The CPA President acknowledged the government’s initial step of rejecting a copyright carve-out for AI but stressed that the next phase—licensing and enforcement—will be crucial for the survival of regional publishing. “Australia solved this problem once through the News Media Bargaining Code. We now need the AI equivalent before the harm becomes irreversible,” Morgan concluded.
As this situation develops, the urgency for protective measures grows. The future of regional journalism hangs in the balance, and immediate action is required to safeguard it from the encroaching influence of AI technologies.
