"For this report, we have examined nine countries: the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Across all the countries surveyed, quality journalism is under pressure from well-documented and disruptive market and technology changes. Everywhere, there is growing public and political interest in finding new ways of securing the future of journalism, reflecting its perceived importance to society and the challenges faced by commercial providers. In some countries, the notion of public support for journalism is quite new, in others there has been a long-established tradition of government support since the 1960s. Different approaches have been
taken, but there has emerged a common “toolkit” of measures: indirect support ( for example, a range of tax reliefs and exemptions which reduce costs to news providers and/or encourage higher consumption of news products and services); direct support (for example, direct grants which support various types of news production, marketing and distribution, or long-established public funding of public service media, such as the BBC); encouraging philanthropic support (for example, government support for private donations to support news provision).
The longest established and most widely used schemes are typically based on indirect support for traditional media, in the form of sales tax or value-added-tax relief. These can be costly for government – for example many cost in the region of several hundred million AUD$ a year – and obviously vary by market size. Their critics argue that they can be a blunt form of support, as it is not clear how much of the direct cost of each scheme translates into actual benefits for the newspapers targeted, and they tend not to be linked to any specific type of content. As copy sales fall, they decline in cost and value. Recently, there have been moves (e.g. in France and the Nordic counties, with proposals to do so in the UK) to extend such schemes to digital news subscriptions, with the aim of reaching a wider group of beneficiaries (new as well as established news media), and offsetting a decline in the value of benefits to established publishers as their print sales decline [...]
Alongside or in place of indirect support, the countries we surveyed are turning to more direct forms of public funding, which are seen to offer scope for better targeted support of the journalism that they believe matters to society. These include:
• Support for research and innovation in business models, skills, distribution, marketing etc. Examples include new strategic and support funding schemes in France, new proposals in Sweden and Norway for platform-neutral innovation grants, an Italian fund to support pluralism and innovation, and the UK Cairncross proposal for an innovation fund.
• Support for what in each country is thought to be the most “at -risk” journalism – typically local news in general, local “public interest” reporting, and investigative journalism. Examples include Canada’s proposed fund to support local journalism in underserved communities, the UK’s proposed local public interest journalism fund, France’s local and community media fund and similar proposals in Sweden
• Support for journalism for indigenous communities or minority languages, where commercial provision is uneconomic – for example schemes in Canada and Finland
• Tax credits which are tied to investment in all or particular aspects of news provision." (Executive summary, pages 4-5)