Recall Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer who gets his friends to paint a fence on a sweltering summer day and walks away making them pay him the wages for their labour. Indian media companies are in a similar situation with Facebook and Google. These digital platforms demand gratitude for imparting wider reach to news content and play deaf to sharing revenues for content produced at considerable cost. Google and Facebook don’t have to invest in news gathering but can waltz away with the ad revenues and earn close to trillion dollar valuations while paying a pittance for jour
Level the field: News producers can’t keep incurring the costs while digital platforms drain away profits
