However, I have to disagree with the professors’ basic premise about the Media Bargaining Code taking money from a profitable business to prop up an unprofitable one. First, news should be viewed as a public service, not a business.

That wasn’t the professor’s point - that was the reporter’s. But if you read on, another professor (of media studies) puts it quite aptly:

The reason for this was news organisations were never in the news business, Amanda Lotz, a professor of media studies at QUT, said. "They were in the attention-attraction business. "In another era, if you were an advertiser, a newspaper was a great place to be. “But now there are just much better places to be.”

I honestly can’t recall how long it’s been, but it’s been at least decades since there was a newspaper dedicated to just news. It’s always been all the other stuff piled in - entertainment reading, comics, crosswords, classifieds, public notices, etc - that made a “news” paper worth reading, as well as the news itself.

This problem is older than Facebook. Facebook is simply the newest face of it.