Press. Voanews.
Facebook says it is investing $300 million over the next three years in
local news programs, partnerships and other initiatives. The money will go
toward reporting grants for local newsrooms, expanding Facebook’s program to
help local newsrooms with subscription business models and investing in
nonprofits aimed at supporting local news.
The move comes at a difficult time for the news industry, which is facing
falling profits and print readership. Facebook, like Google, has also been
partly blamed for the ongoing decline in newspapers’ share of advertising
dollars as people and advertisers have moved online.
Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of global news partnerships, acknowledges
the company “can’t uninvent the internet,” but says it wants to work with
publishers to help them succeed on and off the social network.
“The industry is going through a massive transition that has been underway
for a long time,” she said. “None of us have quite figured out ultimately what
the future of journalism is going to look like but we want to be part of
helping find a solution.”
Facebook has increased its focus on local news in the past year after starting
off 2018 with the announcement that it was generally de-emphasizing news
stories and videos in people’s feeds on the social network in favor of posts
from their friends.
At the same time, though, the company has been cautiously testing out
ways to boost local news stories users are interested in and initiatives to
support the broader industry. It launched a feature called “Today In” that
shows people local news and information , including missing-person alerts, road
closures, crime reports and school announcements, expanding it to hundreds of
cities around the U.S. and a few in Australia.
The push to support local news comes as Facebook, which is based in Menlo
Park, California, tries to shake off its reputation as a hotbed for
misinformation and elections-meddling. The company says users have been asking
to see more local content that is relevant to them, including news stories as
well as community information such as road closings during a snowstorm.
The $300 million investment includes a $5 million grant to the nonprofit
Pulitzer Center to launch “Bringing Stories Home,” a fund that will provide
local U.S. newsrooms with reporting grants to support coverage of local issues.
There’s also a $2 million investment in Report for America as part of a partnership
aiming to place 1,000 journalists in local newsrooms across the country over
the next five years.
The idea behind the investments, Brown said, is to look “holistically at
how a given publisher can define a business model. Facebook can’t be the only
answer, the only solution — we don’t want the publisher to be dependent on
Facebook.”
Fran Wills, CEO of the Local Media Consortium, which is receiving $1
million together with the Local Media Association to help their member
newsrooms develop new revenue streams, said she is optimistic the investment
will help.
“I think they are recognizing that trusted, credible content is of
benefit not only to local publishers but to them,” she said.
Associated Press