Good Afternoon and happy Monday! If you're working from home or in the office, enjoy yourself and try to keep your sanity during these crazy times (studying English can help with that!).

VOCAB WORDS:
- coroner (not to be confused with corner)
- journalism
- publishers
- summer
- monopolistic

TRANSCRIPT:
It reads like a coroner's report on the news business, 623 pages filled with charts and graphs detailing the devastating decline in local news and public policy reporting of the past decade. It landed on the Australian prime minister's desk last summer, unnoticed by most news consumers in America and around the world. 

But the report by Australian regulators left little doubt about what they see as the cause of local journalism's demise - the near monopolistic power of Google and Facebook. And it has set off a chain of events that could shift the balance of power between big tech and the news at a dire moment for journalism. 

"Global tech companies are not beyond national laws, especially when there is so much at stake," Rod Sims, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and author of the report, texted me this weekend on WhatsApp. 

Mr. Sims and a like-minded regulator in France, Isabelle de Silva, are challenging a universally accepted fact of the internet: that Google and Facebook can carry content created by news organizations without directly paying the organizations for creating it. Last month, as the coronavirus put hundreds of publishers out of business around the world, the Australian government instructed Mr.Sims to force the platforms to negotiate payments with newspaper publishers - making it the first country to do so. 

CREDITS:
Article: Big Tech Has Crushed the News Business. That's About to Change.
Author: Ben Smith
Publisher: The New York Times
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/business/media/big-tech-has-crushed-the-news-business-thats-about-to-change.html