#News Corp. agrees to three-year deal with Facebook in Australia

News Corp. on Monday said it has reached a new three-year deal with Facebook in Australia — one of the first major deals announced since that country last month passed a law effectively forcing tech titans to pay for news content they link to on their sites.

The agreement calls for Facebook to pay for News Corp. news provided to its Facebook News platform and includes The Australian national newspaper, the news.com.au news site, The Daily Telegraph in New South Wales, the Herald Sun in Victoria and The Courier-Mail in Queensland, as well as other regional and community publications.

Sky News Australia also reached an agreement with Facebook extending it existing pay arrangement.

“The agreement with Facebook is a landmark in transforming the terms of trade for journalism, and will have a material and meaningful impact on our Australian news businesses,” News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson said. “Mark Zuckerberg and his team deserve credit for their role in helping to fashion a future for journalism, which has been under extreme duress for more than a decade.”

Thomson applauded News Corp. leaders Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch for leading the global debate on tech giants paying for news — even “while others in our industry were silent or supine as digital dysfunctionality threatened to turn journalism into a mendicant order.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But it comes just weeks after Australia passed its Media Bargaining Code into law, allowing collective bargaining between publishers and take titans.

Facebook, in an effort to stop the law from being passed, went so far as to block all Australian news outlets from posting on the site anywhere in the country. This led to criticisms that the site was potentially blocking life-saving information for citizens. Indeed, Facebook inadvertently stopped some Australia government emergency services Web sites from being accessed via the social network.

In the US, a bipartisan bill to also allow publishers to band together to negotiate with tech giants like Facebook and Google has been introduced in both the House and the Senate.