By Pascal Oparada, Social Media/Tech Reporter
After tweaking its algorithm to downgrade news platforms in 2018, which it says is an effort to curtail the explosion of fake news on the platform, Facebook is launching a $300 million initiative for local news.
The grant would go to various initiatives and organisations.
Facebook would be following in the steps of Google which announced a similar initiative about 10 months ago.
Google said the News Initiative is focused on three broad goals — strengthening quality journalism, supporting sustainable business models and empowering newsrooms through technological innovation. It’s also committing to spending $300 million over the next three years on its various journalism-related projects.
Vice President of Global News Partnerships, Campbel Brown said the investments will go into two broad areas – supporting journalists and newsrooms in the news-gathering process and helping them build sustainable business models.
Analysts believe Facebook is doing so to save face after many news platforms began to struggle because of the change in its algorithm.
But for it’s worth, the project would galvanize already struggling newsrooms and journalists and empower them to do better.
The company says it will invest:
$5 million in the Pulitzer Center (with a $5 million matching gift from Emily Rauh Pulitzer) to launch “Bringing Stories Home,” an initiative offering reporting grants to cover topics that affect local communities.
$2 million in Report for America, an initiative to place 1,000 journalists in local newsrooms across America over the next five years.
$1 million for the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund, which is trying to create a hub for evaluating and improving how technology is used in U.S. newsrooms.
a $1 million investment in the Local Media Association and the Local Media Consortium, to help their 2,000-plus member newsrooms develop branded content revenue streams (both on and off Facebook).
a $1 million commitment to the American Journalism Project, which is using “venture philanthropy” to support local news organizations.
$6 million for the Community News Project, which is partnering with U.K. publishers to recruit trainee “community journalists” and place them in local newsrooms over a two-year period.
More than $20 million to expand Facebook’s Accelerator program to help local publishers with their membership and subscription models.
“We are grateful for Facebook’s commitment to helping us meet the challenges of today’s journalism, especially in smaller cities where the survival of news outlets depends on new models of reporting and community engagement,” said Pulitzer Center founder and executive director Jon Sawyer in a statement. “We also applaud Facebook’s commitment to the editorial independence that is absolutely essential to our success.”
