"Halting the decline of public interest media requires systematically recognizing, measuring, and rewarding the true value of public interest media to national and global economies and enabling governments to more effectively guide both public and private innovation. As we have argued, too much of this “value” is currently being appropriated by digital platforms and AI firms, whose profits rest on the information produced by other content providers.
At the core of our recommendations is the idea that a coherent set of deliberate policies are needed to ensure that more of the returns on their efforts can be captured by fact-based independent journalism, sustaining their work while ensuring their product remains in the public domain. This would establish a very different set of market signals that would in turn attract more investment flows back into the information ecosystem, helping to restore a new positive cycle arrangement.
In line with such a fundamental reassessment of the importance of public interest media in the information age, we propose two priority actions: ➜ Action 1. Invest in free and independent journalism by diversifying and increasing resources for the production of reliable information; ➜ Action 2. Shape informational ecosystems in the public interest through active use of industrial policies and safeguards against media capture and interference." (Pages 14-15)