UK newspaper industry body wants Google, FB pay journalism tax

London, Sept 28: You can't have the fun for free.

Britain's newspaper industry's trade body News Media Association (NMA) which represents most of the country's media wants Google, Facebook and other sites that host news content to pay an annual journalism tax, i.e., tax to fund journalism in the UK, Mashable reported.

The body's proposal came as the British newspaper industry shrank from $8.94 billion to $4.73 billion between 2007 and 2017, the Guardian reported earlier this week.

The organisation did not hide its qualms saying the main concern for the journalism industry today is the loss of advertising revenues which had helped in sustaining quality work and are now going to global search engines and social media companies that, according to it, make no meaningful contribution to the cost of producing the original content from which they benefit richly.

As per a Pew report of 2017, Google and Facebook's platforms have become an increasingly significant source of news as two-thirds of Americans receive some of their news from social media. Reuters Institute and University of Oxford researched to show that in 2018, social media was a news source for 39 per cent of people residing in the UK.

The NMA also proposed that Facebook should share its revenue with newspapers when their stories appear in the users' feeds and even when the latter don't click on them. The NMA, likewise, would also like the tech firms to give "reasonable notice" when they change their terms of business of algorithms that leave an impact on news publishers, the report added.