Fair Compensation for News: Who Decides, Who Gets Paid, and Why the Global South Shouldn´t Be an Afterthought
By Dr Janine Deselaers
As part of its ongoing contribution to UNESCO’s Draft Guidance on Fair Compensation for News, the Centre for Information Integrity in Africa (CINIA) participated in a live webinar on 21 July hosted in collaboration with the Media20, UNESCO, ALT Advisory, International Fund for Public Interest Media and the GIBS Business School (Gordon Institute of Business Science) to discuss the Guidance.
Representing CINIA, Dr. Janine Deselaers argued that eligibility and compensation need to be designed around independent, public-interest journalism, not market scale, for the Guidance to be genuinely fair. Most mechanisms run on market logic, risking funds flowing to whoever is already best positioned and resourced to “look like news,” rather than to outlets actually serving the public interest.
She made this point with the Global South in mind as many compensation models are drawn from stronger-institution markets and don’t easily translate to landscapes where independent outlets face structural disadvantages in scale, funding, and negotiating power, plus commercial competition from large, international, or state-owned outlets as well as political pressure.
Deselaers noted that “media landscapes are shrinking and disinformation networks are filling the spaces that independent media are leaving behind,” which is why fair compensation for news isn’t a side conversation for information integrity, but central to it.
Another point Deselaers raised was that gender is entirely absent as an analytical category in the draft, arguing that a feminist perspective could shift the analysis to ask who a framework quietly assumes as its default subject, pushing the analysis of power structures beyond platforms to within the media ecosystem itself.
Otherwise, criteria risk continuing to favour those with existing access to capital and institutional power, excluding those historically marginalised.
As journalism’s sustainability crisis deepens, CINIA remains committed to pushing conversations on fair compensation to take diverse contexts seriously, strengthening information integrity and independent media in Africa and beyond.
Further Reading
- The Center for Media & Digital Governance (CMDG)‘s “Technology & Media Fair Compensation Frameworks: Global Tracker”. VIEW HERE.
- “Like-minded organizations must join forces to demand fair compensation and more equitable digital ecosystems,” write Milliken, Drefs, Kimani, Mong and Albrecht, in an article titled ‘Media development and fair compensation’, for DW Akademie. READ HERE.
