By: Yassmine ElSayed
CAIRO, Jan. 16 (SEE) – Facebook announced plans to invest $300 million over the next three years in news initiatives, with a focus on local news partnerships and other programs.
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.
She explained that 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. It will also be used for Facebook's other, broad news initiatives
such as news literacy programs and third-party fact-checking.
"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.
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.