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MEDIA

Social Democrats ‘should become media players’

Sweden's opposition Social Democrats should become players on the media market again, party secretary Marita Ulvskog has said, proposing that a special group come up with concrete proposals for new media projects.

The party and its affiliated unions should get better at “taking up those questions that are important for wage-earners,” Ulvskog said.

“It would be made easier if we were an active player in some way or another on the media market…as for whether this means ownership [of media] or something else is something I can’t answer today,” she told TT.

Ulvskog wouldn’t say whether she was thinking about starting a newspaper operation, but said it was a shame that Social Democrat-owned publisher A-press went bankrupt in the early 1990s.

“I was very much opposed to us passing up the chance to keep important newspapers, even if they were quite small papers,” she said.

“I don’t thing we should hold back from exerting influence over areas in which power is concentrated, as it is in the media market,” she said.

The party’s media policy group will focus on “taking those chances that come our way and holding a discussion with others who are interested in us having a greater spread of ownership on the media market,” Ulvskog said.

Members of the media group include union movement LO’s Erland Olausson and the party’s treasurer Tommy Ohlström. Olausson is a member of the board of Aftonbladet, Sweden’s best-selling newspaper.

The Social Democrats and their allies in the union movement already have control over certain Swedish media. Aftonbladet is half-owned by LO, which controls the political direction of the newspaper. Norrländska Socialdemokraten, the largest paper in northern Sweden, is owned by a local branch of the Social Democratic Party.

BUSINESS

Google News to return to Spain after seven-year spat

Google announced Wednesday the reopening of its news service in Spain next year after the country amended a law that imposed fees on aggregators such as the US tech giant for using publishers’ content.

Google News to return to Spain after seven-year spat
Google argues its news site drives readers to Spanish newspaper and magazine websites and thus helps them generate advertising revenue.Photo: Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD / AFP

The service closed in Spain in December 2014 after legislation passed requiring web platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay publishers to reproduce content from other websites, including links to their articles that describe a story’s content.

But on Tuesday the Spanish government approved a European Union copyright law that allows third-party online news platforms to negotiate directly with content providers regarding fees.

This means Google no longer has to pay a fee to Spain’s entire media industry and can instead negotiate fees with individual publishers.

Writing in a company blog post on Wednesday, Google Spain country manager Fuencisla Clemares welcomed the government move and announced that as a result “Google News will soon be available once again in Spain”.

“The new copyright law allows Spanish media outlets — big and small — to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and how they want to make money with that content,” she added.

“Over the coming months, we will be working with publishers to reach agreements which cover their rights under the new law.”

News outlets struggling with dwindling print subscriptions have long seethed at the failure of Google particularly to pay them a cut of the millions it makes from ads displayed alongside news stories.

Google argues its news site drives readers to newspaper and magazine websites and thus helps them generate advertising revenue and find new subscribers.

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